Faith and Freedom, Thirteenth Thursday (I), July 4, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati
Independence Day
July 4, 2019
Gen 22:1-19, Ps 115, Mt 9:1-8

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On this Independence Day in the United States, it is important for us to ponder the meaning and purpose of our freedom. “For freedom, Christ has set us free,” St. Paul told us Sunday from his letter to the Galatians. With those few words, the apostle points to what Christ gained for us and what our freedom is for. Jesus came into our world to set us free, free from the power of sin and from the death to which sin always leads. But that liberation by Christ has a purpose: Christ has set us free “for freedom.” He has liberated us in order that we may truly be free, but such freedom is not a given. As Pope Benedict XVI said at the White House 11 years ago. “Freedom is ever new. It is a challenge held out to each generation, and it must constantly be won over for the cause of good.” That’s why St. Paul tells us, “So stand firm [in freedom] and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.” Christ has set us free but we need to use that great gift of freedom to continue to follow him rather than to return to the slavery of sin. Freedom is ultimately preserved by linking it to love and to truth. St. Paul tells us that our freedom is meant to be used to “serve one another through love, for the whole law is fulfilled in one statement, namely, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Our freedom is ultimately so that with self-mastery we can give ourselves to others in loving service. The second condition is the truth. Jesus tells us in St. John’s Gospel: “If you keep my Word, then you will know the Truth and the Truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32). To stay free, we must live according to the Truth, the truth about right and wrong, the truth about who we are made in God’s image and likeness, the truth about our calling to a life of loving communion with Him and others. Freedom is not the ability to do whatever we want, wherever we want, whenever we want, with anyone we want, without the interference of anyone we don’t want. It’s not the power to pretend that we are God, determining good and evil, even deciding over life and death. Freedom, rather, is the capacity to act in accordance with the truth about who we are in God’s image and likeness. It’s the ability to live with virtue, the self-mastery that allows us to become whom God created us to be as images of him who is both love and truth.
• We see characteristics of that freedom on full display in today’s readings. Abraham’s freedom came from his faith in the truth of what God had revealed. He knew that Isaac was the son of the promise, the one through whom Abraham would become the father of many nations, and that’s why, when God asked him to take his son to Mount Moriah to sacrifice him, he was capable freely as a dad of doing so because he believed — he knew — that God would raise him from the dead, as the Letter of the Hebrews later made explicit. Likewise Isaac was able not to squirm out in fear when his father bound him because he totally trusted in the truth of his father’s love for him.
• Similarly in the Gospel, we see how freedom leads us to creativity in confronting various impediments. When the friends of the paralyzed man found the house packed with people listening to Jesus with no one making room to allow their disabled friend inside, they, not missing a beat, climbed on top of the house, took off the root, and lowered their friend down literally on top of Jesus. Their love for their friend helped make them free in this way. And Jesus, once the man was lowered down, sought to liberate him. Notice he liberated him first from sin, because the greatest slavery is to sin. Then he liberated him from his physical paralysis so that he would be able to be a sign of his future resurrection (“arise, take up your stretcher and go home”) as he was now able to walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast day of someone who was truly free precisely because the truth had made him free and he used that freedom to love. When Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901-1925) was a young boy two things happened to him that had an enormous impact on his life. The first was contact with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, with the truth of his real presence. He knew that God was dwelling with him in the Holy Eucharist. And so he had a tremendous sense of the sacred that he never lost. Over the course of his few years of life on earth, he would often spend all night in adoration of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. His parents were once worried about him, and contacted the priest was the chaplain at his Catholic high school, thinking that their son was spending all night getting into trouble. Little did they know! And because of his communion with Jesus in the Eucharist, something that he received permission to receive every day, he began to have a communion with Jesus’s great love especially for those on the margins, those who were poor, those who were sick, those who are in most need. That leads us to the second great experience he had when he was a young boy. A poor family came to his home in Turin, begging for alms. Pier Giorgio answered the door, and when he saw a boy his old age, who had no shoes, he gave him his own shoes. Later when he was a little older, he encountered a poor man on the streets with no winter jacket. It was 10°F. Pier Giorgio immediately gave the shivering man his own winter jacket, something about which his father would become very angry. But the future blessed simply replied, “It was cold!” That would lead to a lifetime of charity in just a few years. He joined a local conference of St. Vincent de Paul, which led him eventually to take custody of hundreds of poor people. He was responsible for their medicine, their food, sometimes even their rent. He would spend all the money that was given him in care for the poor. He would dedicate his entire allowance to those in need, he gave all his high school graduation gifts to the poor, and he would often forsake the train in order to walk home so that the train money could be given to those who are in greater need. There’s one famous story that when a friend asked him why he was taking the third class on the train, even though as the son of the founder of the famous Italian newspaper La Stampa, who would be a senator in Italy and the future ambassador to Germany, he was easily able to afford the first class, which would be more in line with his aristocratic roots. Pier Giorgio replied that the reason he was in third class because there was no fourth class. He was keeping a tearful list of all those he was helping, to make sure none would fall through the cracks. Eventually he caught polio from one of the women for whom he was caring. He caught a particularly virulent form of the disease, one that would prove fatal in general within a week. He didn’t tell his family members because they were all caring for his grandmother who at the time was on her deathbed. But on the night before he died, he left a note for one of his friends who was with him in the St. Vincent Depaul conference describing how one of the poor for whom he was caring needed to receive his injections the following day. And he entrusted to his little sister the book in which he had listed all the poor he was helping, the money they needed, the food they needed, the medicine they needed, and so many other things. It was only then that she became aware of just how broad and apostolate of charity her brother was exercising. His funeral is one of the most beautiful events in recent hagiography. After his death, his parents anticipated that he would have a decent size funeral because many of the people of their class would show up to offer their condolences. They had no idea the thousands of poor people from Turin would also show up to the funeral. They had no idea why so many poor people were there. They soon found out. But the poor were also in for a surprise. The one who was caring for them used to call himself Fra Girolamo, because when he became a member of the third order of the Dominicans, he had taken the name Jerome (Girolamo in Italian) after one of his great heroes, Girolamo Savonarola. They had no idea that the one caring for them was a member of the famous Frassati family. But both his parents and his poor friends recognized in him a man who was absolutely full of joy, charity, in faith, someone who in short had reminded them that God was with them. Pier Giorgio Frassati’s motto was “Verso l’alto,” an expression he would often write on photographs that captured him climbing steep mountains where he would lead hikes. It means an Italian, “toward the top!,” and it is a fitting summary of his entire life. He was free to climb. He was free to strive to go to the top, seeking the things that are above, the things where Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father. And he was free to go to help the poor, the downtrodden, those in the pit, be lifted up. He was capable of so much love in such a short time because he regularly received Christ within in daily Mass who made him free. And he did all of this with joy, because he knew that when one is living the truth and serving in love, when one is in communion with Christ in the sacraments and prayer, and in communion with Christ in becoming a servant of all, one finds a joy that the world cannot give or rob. As we celebrate today with joy our national Independence Day, we recognize that the greatest way we can use our freedom and serve our nation is to continue the type of loving service that Blessed Pier Giorgio gave his contemporaries: a witness of incredible joy that comes from Christ in living his Gospel; a witness of the new life Christ gives; a witness of the grace for which he wants us always to hunger; a witness of how Christ has set us free for freedom. God has made us free precisely so that we can love in the truth.
• One last story for this Independence Day. Our nation was built on what on this day 243 years ago Thomas Jefferson and the courageous founding fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence called the “self-evident” proposition that we’re all endowed by our Creator, by God, with inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If you go to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC, on one side you’ll see a huge inscription of the words of the Declaration of Independence he authored, pointing to these self-evident truths I just cited and most of us know by heart. On the opposite side, however, you’ll read other words by Jefferson that are less famous but now just as crucial to recall. “The God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” There is a connection between the life and the liberty God gave us. To secure our freedom, we need to assure our life. That’s one more reason why the Sisters of Life are so important and why we pray for you on this Independence Day, for your service to our country: in your defending life, you are helping us all to see the divine source of our freedom for which Christ has set us free.
• Today as we come to receive Him who made Blessed Pier Giorgio so free, we ask the Lord, through Blessed Pier Giorgio’s intercession and the intercession of all of the American saints, to fulfill our prayer in the Psalm so that we “will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: