Unabashed to Believe, Live and Proclaim the Gospel, 28th Tuesday (I), October 13, 2015

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass of Our Lady of Fatima
October 13, 2015
Rom 1:16-25, Ps 19, Lk 11:37-41

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

The following points were attempted during the homily:

• “I am not ashamed of the Gospel,” St. Paul emphatically tells the Romans at the beginning of today’s epistle. Those are very strong words for someone who, at a human level, might have had many reasons to be shamefaced and silent about the Gospel. After all he was scourged, beaten with rods stoned, shipwrecked, ambushed, hunted down and imprisoned on account of the Gospel. He was crisscrossing the globe to preach preposterously that a publicly executed carpenter from an obscure village not only had risen the dead and was alive but was also the Lord and Son of God. Jesus’ crucifixion, he knew, was a laughing stock for Greeks and an embarrassing scandal for Jews. But despite it all he stressed that he was not ashamed of the Gospel, in all its paradoxical details, because he knew that, however improbable it might seem to human wisdom, it was in fact the power and wisdom of God.
• It’s important that we confront and with God’s grace overcome any embarrassment we have over our faith. There are many in the Church who are ashamed of the Gospel. In the context of an aggressive secularism that is pushing hedonism, materialism, individualism, and rationalistic empiricism, and often mocks Church teaching as the morality of unenlightened, antediluvian cavemen, many feel somewhat humiliated to give witness to their Catholic faith. Many Catholics have been made to feel that the Gospel is not only “bad news,” but on occasion even ridiculous. Catholics after all believe that we adore and eat God himself in Holy Communion, even though to the world all we’re doing is consuming cheap bread and wine. We believe, according to Jesus’ own words, that the path of happiness is spiritual poverty instead of riches, purity instead of sexual profligacy, spiritual hunger instead of satiety, meekness instead of strength, and persecution instead of popularity. We believe in praying for persecutors, forgiving those who hate us seventy times seven times, and turning the other cheek. We believe that we shouldn’t commit even the slightest sin even if we were able to win the whole world.
•  And then we get to the really controversial issues today. We believe that the Pope is infallible — he cannot make a mistake, ever — on something that he teaches to be definitively held by all the faithful on something we need to be (faith) or do (morals) to please God and enter into his life. We believe that even though men and women are equal in dignity before God, only men are capable of being ordained priests.We believe that not even rape and incest victims should morally be able to take the lives of the unwanted children growing within them. We believe that everyone should remain chaste and sexually abstinent until marriage, and that all sex outside of marriage is sinful. We believe that even though almost everyone, including Catholic married couples, use some form of contraception at some point in their marriages, that it is still wrong. We profess to love those with same-sex attractions while at the same time saying that they should never, ever be able to act on those attractions by engaging in same-sex sexual activity. These are among the issues that make many members of Christ’s flock sheepish with regard to living and sharing the faith. It’s often some priests, religious and Catholics professionally involved in education that are among the most ashamed. One of the great dramas taking place in the Synod of Bishops on the Family in the Vatican right now, I’m convinced, is about whether we’re ashamed of Jesus’ teaching about the indissolubility of marriage or whether we think it’s part of the truth that sets people free, part of the Gospel that, although hard to live in circumstances, is meant to bring us to God and fill us with joy.
•  St. Paul was not ashamed of the Gospel and his example is an inspiration to all Catholics. After describing his holy pride and confidence in the Gospel that is the “power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes,” he went on to tackle straight on many of the contemporary ideas that made those in Rome consider the faith farcical. He dissected the “impiety and wickedness” found in those who deny God even though creation would make no sense without a creator anymore than a wooden chair would make sense without a carpenter. He described the foolishness of pagan worship, which exchanges God’s glory to adore statues of birds, snakes or savage quadrupeds. He mentioned the slavery of those who gave in through the lust of their hearts for the “mutual degradation of their bodies,” worshipping the creature instead of the Creator. In all of these cases, as G.K. Chesterton once quipped, “When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything.”
• Jesus himself sought to teach us by his own example how not to be ashamed of the Gospel. In the midst of an encounter in which his Pharisaical host wanted to make him feel guilty for not having washed his hands, Jesus used it as an example to teach us about how to cleanse our insides, by giving of ourselves totally to living the Gospel as generously as Jesus did. He says that we become pure on the inside by almsgiving, which means not just giving a quarter to a poor person or a quarter of a million to the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, but by giving of ourselves in love to God and others. It means like St. Paul giving ourselves together with the Gospel and not being ashamed of doing either, even if no one else is doing so besides Jesus. The path to purity of heart, to cleaning our insides, is a truly Eucharistic life in which we receive Jesus’ total self-gift and say, in return, this is my body, my blood, my sweat, my flesh given out of love for you.
•  Today we mark the 98th anniversary of the sixth and final apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the shepherd children in Fatima, Blessed Jacinta, Blessed Francisco and Lúzia. In an age in which so many in Portugal were ashamed of their Catholic inheritance, where secularism and basically the beginnings of Bolshevism had overtaken the press and the academy, Mary came to meet three young shepherd kids and help them grow in piety. She taught them through visions the evil causes by sin — visions of hell, the destruction of atheistic communion, and the suffering of the Church — but also taught them the solution in prayer and consecration to her Immaculate Heart. She helped them to be proud of the Gospel, to believe it and to live it, even when everyone else was treating them like a bunch of liars or psychotic children. They were proud even to suffer with Mary for the conversion of sinners. Their example as children is a witness to us all.
• The devil ultimately wants to make us ashamed of our faith. Jesus wants us to be humbly proud of it, to see it as an incredible gift, to live it as he did and then to share it with others who still worship false gods who cannot save. May the Lord strengthen us and the whole Church to be justly proud and grateful for every part of the Good News and give us the courage and love to share it with everyone so that their lives might similarly be filled with the “power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: