​Dominica Pentecostes [Pentecost Sunday]: May 31, 2020
Delivered by Most Reverend Roger LaRade, O.F.A.
Beloved Disciple Eucharistic Catholic Church, Toronto
© 2020 Roger LaRade
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Acts 2, 1 – 11, John 14, 23 - 31.
 
“…the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you myself.”
 
The reading from the Acts of the Apostles which is our first reading for today’s Mass is undoubtedly well-known to us. And the picture which goes with it, that of the tongues of fire sitting on the heads of Holy Mary, the Apostles and the disciples probably comes easily to mind. It is so familiar that I think it often loses its meaning for us; it loses its punch, its power.
 
But what an amazing event this is which is told to us in this reading. Think of it. This group of people, followers of Jesus, have been bewildered by recent events. First, Jesus was horribly tortured and died. Then, He resurrected and appeared to them numerous times. Then, He left them by ascending to God the Father, His Father from Whom He had come, and to Whom He needed to return. This group of followers was holed up in the Upper Room, the Cenacle, that same room where Jesus had celebrated the Last Supper with them. They are hiding there out of fear of what might happen to them. Their leader was now gone and they no longer had any sense of direction. They simply didn’t have a clue as to what to do.
 
And then this amazing event happens: As Jesus had promised them, in His returning to His rightful place with the Father, the Holy Spirit is sent to His followers. And this Holy Spirit makes all the difference. It is through this experience that the followers of Jesus begin to preach His truth. The Acts of the Apostles recounts the beginnings of this preaching and the growth of the Church. This preaching is understood by all: “Aren’t these people who are speaking all Galileans? How is it, then, that each of us hears them in his native language?”
 
It seems to me that the coming of the Holy Spirit is about an intense experience of God’s presence in one’s life. The Spirit of God is represented in Scripture, both Jewish and Christian, as breath. This Spirit is the very breath of God, the very life of God. The Holy Spirit is indeed “the Giver of Life” as we pray in our profession of faith, the Creed. And so, this experience of the presence of God is an experience of the very life of God. This is what is given to the followers of Jesus in today’s reading from Acts. This is what is given to each one of us as followers of Jesus. As Catholics, we believe that this is first given to us at Baptism and then comes most powerfully, completely, and permanently to us in the Sacrament of Confirmation. This Sacrament brings with it the Grace and responsibility to live our faith in an adult manner, in the manner of the first Apostles.
 
Just as God gave life to the first human beings by breath, so do God breathes life into us. We have been given the very breath of God. This is the reason why Jesus was born as a human being, died, was resurrected and ascended to be once again with the Father. As a favourite commentator of mine puts it: God became human so that we might become God.[i]The meaning of the life, death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus is that a place might be made in our hearts, in our bodies, for the life-breath of God. You’ll have often heard about our body being the temple of the Holy Spirit. This is precisely what this means: in us lives the life-breath of God. Our God is not only a far-off God, a transcendent God. Our God is also as close to us as our own breath; our God is also an immanent God.

“…the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you myself.”
 
The Holy Spirit deepens our understanding of the post-Resurrection vision which we have been experiencing since the Feast of Easter: a vision of a new way of seeing ourselves. Today, we see that this post-Resurrection understanding makes us realize that our God is a most intimate God.
 
Furthermore, we recognize that in us lives God’s desire for justice and love, the hallmarks of Jesus’ life: “If anyone loves me, they will keep my word. Then my Father will love them, and we shall come to them and make our dwelling-place with them.” The deeper meaning of these words of Jesus comes to us through our reception of the Holy Spirit, which opens our minds and our hearts. It is this Grace-filled experience of God’s love for us that transforms our vision and our understanding. With this new vision and new understanding, we see our life, our world, and our Church with the eyes of God, eyes saddened by injustice, eyes seeking out justice based in love. We see ourselves as the very vessels of God’s justice and love for the world, and for the Church.
 
In this season of Easter, when Resurrection is followed by Christ’s Ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Church calls us to rejoice and partake in the glorious love of God the Father and God the Son, that love which is the Holy Spirit. Let us pray for one another, as we share in this loving Spirit, that our post-Resurrection vision of God’s love and justice may be deepened and become the center of our lives as Catholics.

[i]See Aemiliana Löhr, The Mass through the Year: Volume Two – Holy Week to the Last Sunday after Pentecost(London: Longmans, Green & Co Ltd, 1959), p. 153.

by Father Richard Sorfleet, St. John the Evangelist Mission, Renfrew ON Canada

Friday May 22, the President of the United States called for churches to reopen starting this weekend.  The Associated Press (AP) report states:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday that he has deemed churches and other houses of worship “essential” and called on governors across the country to allow them to reopen this weekend, even as some parts of the nation remain under coronavirus lockdown.

“Today I’m identifying houses of worship — churches, synagogues and mosques — as essential places that provide essential services,” Trump said during a hastily arranged press conference at the White House.

Despite the threat of further spreading the virus. Trump said that, “governors need to do the right thing and allow these very important essential places of faith to open right now, for this weekend.” And he warned that if governors don’t abide by his request, he will “override” them...
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The definition of what constitutes an 'essential service' in an epidemic has been that from the health perpective of the minimum necessary activities to ensure that society continues to function. 

Throughout the Covid 19 crisis the evangelical Right has either pressured for relaxation or exemption from State health regulations or simply flouted them with at times deadly consequences. It is shameful that these groups cannot understand their own theology's definition of what constitutes the Church.

We believe and confess
one single catholic or universal church--
a holy congregation and gathering
of true Christian believers,
awaiting their entire salvation in Jesus Christ,
being washed by his blood,
and sanctified and sealed by the Holy Spirit....
his holy church
is not confined,
bound,
or limited to a certain place or certain people.
But it is spread and dispersed
throughout the entire world,
though still joined and united
in heart and will,
in one and the same Spirit,
by the power of faith

Article 27, Belgic Confession 1561

Instead of being a source of spiritual comfort and credible information, some wish to use the church to further their own temporal ends.

A recommended source of spiritual comfort during this trying time is reading the Book of the Prophet Job. 

One of the key Easter season Gospel readings is from John 16.

16 “A little while, and you will no longer see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me.” 17 Some of His disciples then said to one another, “What is this thing He is telling us, ‘A little while, and you will not see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me’; and, ‘because I go to the Father’?” 18 So they were saying, “What is this that He says, ‘A little while’? We do not know what He is talking about.”
NASB

We will see each other again and this requires both patience and prudence; and understanding that The Church is the People of God gathered together in Jesus Christ; and not a building. the gathering IN a building will come.

Sanctæ Familiæ [Feast of the Most Holy Family]: January 12, 2020
Delivered by Most Reverend Roger LaRade, O.F.A.
Beloved Disciple Eucharistic Catholic Church, Toronto
 
© 2020 Roger LaRade
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Colossians 3: 12-17, Luke 2: 42-52.
 
Today, we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family, doing so on the Sunday within the Octave of the Epiphany. Jesus is twelve years old. Tomorrow, the Octave Day of Epiphany we will be with Jesus at thirty years of age for His Baptism. Liturgical time moves quickly.
 
I think that we need to consider the Feast of the Holy Family within this context of God become human, that which we celebrate and immerse ourselves in at this time; after all, the family is an institution both human and divine.
 
The Feast of the Holy Family is a Canadian feast. It goes back to the year 1663, to the founding at Montreal of the Association of the Holy Family by Barbara d’Ailleboust, a native of Boulogne. This new devotion to the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph soon spread across Canada, and Mgr. Laval, the Bishop of Québec, established in his diocese a feast of the Holy Family with its own Mass and Office. It was in 1893 that Pope Leo XIII expressed his approval of this celebration for certain dioceses.[1] But only after the First World War did devotion to the Holy Family become important, and, in 1921, Pope Benedict XV extended it to the whole Church. He did so because family life “had suffered greatly because of the first World War.”[2] The purpose for this feast “was to improve family life” and contribute to “the spiritual restoration of the family”[3], as it’s put.
 
It doesn’t take much probing in older missals and books of piety to discover how this devotion has been used in an extremely sentimentalized and moralistic manner to support what many of us know from our own experience to be an unrealistic – no, rather an unreal – notion of the family. There is no doubt that the family is a foundational component of society, and that our faith speaks to family life. Most of us are born into families. I say ‘most of us’, for immediately we confront the many limitations imposed on the ideal family by real life. Indeed, many children who are adopted were not born into a family and have memories of being in an orphanage for a time or of being shuttled from foster family to foster family. From our experience, and our sharing the experience of others, we know that some family stories are stories of supportive and encouraging love. We also know that some family stories are horror stories of neglectful and abusive selfishness. In-between, there exists the multiplicity of human interactions, mixed experiences composed of good, bad and indifferent relationships coexisting in our memories and our present. And so, the very idea of the Feast of the Holy Family has the potential of conjuring unpleasant, disconcerting, troubling, alienating memories.
 
This is exacerbated for many of us who don’t fit the heterosexual married normative mindset imposed onto the notion of the Holy Family. Here is a pious description of the family:
 
Of the family body the father is the head, even as Christ is the Head of the Mystical Body. The mother is the Church, and the children are members…The daily bread is provided by the father and distributed by the mother; from father and mother, children receive their blood and life…You children, look up to your father, he is Christ…And you, wife and mother, you too must see Christ in your partner. As father, it is your duty to live like Christ and to rule your family as He would.[4]
 
This was written in 1957. But, it doesn’t take long in listening to conservative commentators, both Catholic and Protestant, to find this thinking alive and well in our day.
 
I believe that this thinking is wrong and I recognize in it a perversion of the readings chosen for this Mass of the Holy Family; a perversion in the sense that the readings chosen are made to fit an ideological perspective rather than being allowed to reveal their mystery as guided by the message of Christ. This perversion is not in the presentation of the Holy Family as a model guiding us to a family life marked by love, selflessness and peace[5] – all things to which we can aspire. No. The perversion comes in presenting the Holy Family as a divine institution modeling ‘family’ as being composed of father, mother and child to the exclusion of all others. In this view, no other model has legitimacy since it does not – indeed cannot – replicate the Holy Family. To hold this view is to do an injustice to the message of Christ. This occurs every time biblical passages are chosen to support the status quo, to keep in their place those who don’t fit the norms of the ruling collective.
 
The English writer on Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill writes about Epiphany in the following words:
 
The Epiphany means the free pouring out of a limitless light – the Light of the World – not its careful communication to those whom we hold worthy to receive it.[6]
 
The Feast of the Holy Family may speak to us through the words of today’s epistle and gospel readings and through our meditation on Jesus, Mary and Joseph. But it will not as long as it is restricted to being a sentimentalized, moralizing, and heterosexist shaft of light. It needs, rather, be opened to the multiple possibilities of family lives made possible and enlightened by the Light of the World manifested among us.

[1] Dom F. Cabrol, O.S.B., The Roman Missal in Latin and English (Tours: A. Mame and Sons, 1921), p. 80.

[2] Dr. Pius Parsch, The Church’s Year of Grace, Volume 1: Advent to Candlemas (Collegeville, MN.: The Liturgical Press, 1957), p. 289.

[3] Ibid., p. 290.

[4] Ibid., p. 294.

[5] R. P. J. Feder, S.J., Missel Quotidien des Fidèles (Tours : Maison Mame, 1961), p. 105.

[6] Evelyn Underhill, The School of Charity: Meditations on the Christian Creed (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1934), p. 44.

by Father Richard Sorfleet

​The BBC recently reported on the erection of a 'helter-skelter' slide inside Norwich [UK] cathedral to attract visitors. Amusements are nothing new with Rochester cathedral having been at one time turned into a mini-putt golf course. Yet Norwich's fame as a religious center of English Christianity does not need to rely on seaside distractions as one of the most famous of female medieval mystic writers Julian of Norwich lived there as an anchoress in the late 14th and early 15th C.

Almost nothing is known about Julian's life (c. 1342-c. 1413)  not even her real name. As was the custom of anchorites, she took the name Julian from the name of the church where she lived in a cell. The Norwich church was named for St. Julian (337-352).

What information we have about her is in her writing, The Revelations of Divine Love In this volume of which there are two versions -long and short, she explains that she was thirty years old when at the end of a grave illness she received fourteen revelations or "showings." Later two other visions followed. 
In her fifties, Julian wrote about the meaning of these showings. She described her struggles with sin as well as sin's effect on humanity and on personal relationship with God. The theme of her writings, one of the masterpieces of Middle English literature and with proof as authored by a woman, is the great love and compassion of God.
 
She refers to God the Creator as father and mother and refers to the second person of the Trinity as mother. In the Revelations, Julian presents a vision of God in the feminine maternal role. She says God is mother, not simply like a mother.

Julian has been called the first English theologian to write in English. She reflects Christian optimism which is not dominated by sin and the Fall which was the more common theme of medieval and Reformation theology. Her spirituality is animated by grace and love.

Julian is commemorated on May 8th.
​
​Most holy God, the ground of our beseeching,
who through your servant Julian
revealed the wonders of your love:
grant that as we are created in your nature and restored by your grace,
our wills may be so made one with yours
that we may come to see you face to face
and gaze on you for ever;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
[Common Worship]