Becoming Fitting Helpers, Fifth Thursday in Ordinary Time (I), February 13, 2025

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of IESE Business School, Manhattan
Thursday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Blessed James Miller, Martyr
February 13, 2025
Gen 2:18-25, Ps 128, Mk 7:24-30

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On this night on which we will consider together Catholic Social Teaching on integral ecology, we’re fortunate to have as our first reading the passage about the pinnacle of creation, the human person. To care for the gift of creation never means focusing on the environment in isolation but to remember that God created everything good ultimately for the human person made in his image and likeness. Proper stewardship of our common home must always prioritize taking care of our roommates and family members in that common home. The passage from today’s first reading come in the Genesis account after God says, throughout creation, “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,” and with the creation of the human person,  “It is very good.” Finally God exclaims,  “It is not good for the man to be alone.” He waited to make this judgment, we can say, until man himself had had this awareness. Even though man was in relation with God and with the animals he had named, there was still something missing. He needed a “suitable partner,” a “fitting helper.” And that’s what God gave in the creation of Eve. God created such a fitting helper, so that the two of them could help people live as the image of God, live in true communion, and grow more and more into God’s loving image as a communion of persons. This points to two existential realities: first, each of us needs help and it’s not good for us to be without this help; second, we are created as a helper for others. We are created as fitting helpers likewise always in need of suitable help. This is bedrock to Catholic social teaching.
• What we also see in the passage is the basic complementarity at work in this helping and being helped. God didn’t create for Adam merely someone to kill time with, or even a generic helper, but rather a “suitable helper,” a “partner,” someone who makes up for our weaknesses with strength and someone who draws from us our strength to remedy his or her weaknesses. God created Eve out of Adam’s side, to show that they stand side-by-side, equal, before God. The rib symbolizes what covers the heart (the loving center of the person) and the lungs (what is necessary to breathe and survive). Adam exclaims, “Finally this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” a Hebrew expression meaning “strength of my strength and weakness of my weakness,” that they are like each other in strengths and weaknesses and need to help each other. The type of help that is needed is not just a “hand” for the ordinary things of life, but to live as as a loving communion of persons in the image and likeness of God. They can’t grow in love without each other. Without the analogy of human love, Adam had already discovered that he couldn’t really receive and reciprocate (however asymmetrically) divine love. The most suitable help given is with regard to their living in a fully human way according to the divine image.
• That’s what human marriage, par excellence, is supposed to be, when a man and a woman, like Adam and Eve, fittingly help each other to become who they are. That’s why Christ raised marriage to the dignity of a Sacrament, to give his help so that they might resemble the love in the heart of the Trinity, which Christ came as Bridegroom to make possible anew. But it extends to more than marriage. It’s not good for any of us to be alone, we all need fitting helpers, and we all need, to some degree, the complementarity between man and woman to remedy the ways in which, by original differentiation, we are not fully human. John Paul II talked about the “archetypical masculine” and the “archetypical feminine” and the way that men receive love by giving love and women give love by receiving love and how man’s relative strengths in complementarity to woman’s relative weaknesses, and woman’s relative strengths to man’s relative weaknesses, provide the support we need to grow as God’s image. This applies to agape (Christ-like sacrificial love) and philia (love of true friendship) just as much as to eros (romantic love). Man’s courage confronting fears and the unknown, for example, can encourage women to similar boldness and women’s receptivity to the person can complement man’s task-oriented personality. This type of normal, healthy interaction takes place among brothers and sisters in the family, among dads and daughters, moms and sons, among friends of opposite sexes and in ordinary daily interactions.
•  We see an aspect of this complementarity in the beautiful interaction in today’s Gospel. At first glance it seems a little harsh, but Jesus in an almost brutally masculine way was helping the Syro-Phoenician woman to grow in faith and trust, and she, with her beautiful femininity, not only drew forth the Lord’s loving and miraculous generosity, but his extraordinary compliment for her receptive faith. St. Matthew’s account of this scene gives us many more details than St. Mark does today. When this Canaanite woman first approaches Jesus asking her for a miracle for her daughter, the Lord ignores her. When she harasses the apostles begging for their intervention and they ask Jesus on her behalf, Jesus stresses he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, not to pagan women in Phoenicia. When she continues to pursue and falls down begging, “Please, Lord!,” he replies by saying, “It’s not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” But she still doesn’t give up. She reminded him that he was the Good Shepherd even of puppies and retorts, “But even the little dogs eat the scraps that comes from their master’s table.” At this, Jesus replies, “Woman, great is your faith” and performs an immediate exorcism on her daughter at a distance. Jesus behaved in this way precisely because he loved the woman and was helping her to grow in the type of persevering faith and prayer that God wants to develop and see in all of us. Her feminine, maternal persistence led to one of the greatest compliments Jesus is ever recorded giving. And that woman’s great feminine faith was a means to draw greater faith from the apostles. We are all called to be fitting helpers to each other in drawing forth greater faith, hope and love.
• Today we’re celebrating in the Church for the sixth time the feast of a new American blessed who shows us not just how to persevere in faith but how to draw forth, in a masculine way, the faith of the Church. LaSallian Brother James Alfred Miller, a native of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, was martyred for the faith in Guatemala in 1982. Pope Francis, in his 2018 exhortation on holiness, Gaudete et Exsultate, wrote about the “saints next door,” and in many ways Blessed James is an all-American holy neighbor. He was born in 1944 and grew up working hard on his family’s dairy and chicken farm in Custer, Wisconsin, praying at home, and wanting to be priest. He was fascinated by other countries, reading an encyclopedia from cover to cover to get to know foreign countries and regions where he hoped to bring the faith. When he entered Pacelli High School and met the Brothers of the Christian Schools, he quickly discerned he had a vocation to share in their educational apostolate. He entered the juniorate of the community at 15 (much like boys at that time could enter high school seminaries at 14), became a postulant and novice at 18, professed first vows at 21 and final vows at 26. He was sent by the Christian Brothers to St. Mary’s University in Winona, Minnesota, where, hoping to share in their missionary apostolates, he got Bachelors’ and Master’s degrees in Spanish. He was described by those who knew him as likeable, sociable, simple, humble, generous, honest, kind, intelligent, ordered, courageous, prayerful, zealous, and hardworking. His fellow Christian Brothers dubbed him a “common, good guy,” “very human,” “a man of union and communion,” who had the “gift of gab,” a perpetual smile, a “deep faith and love for his religious vocation,” and a contagious, boisterous guffaw. He also, they noted, was perpetually “late to class and community prayers,” something that Cardinal José Luis Lacunza of Panama, presiding over his 2019 beatification, joked had prepared him very well for service in Latin America, “where punctuality is not numbered among our virtues!” His first assignment was to teach Spanish, English and religion for a few years at Cretin High School in St. Paul, Minnesota. While there, he supervised the maintenance of the school, earning the nickname “Brother Fix-It.” He also coached football, a sport at which, at 6’2” and 220 pounds, he was prone to excel. In 1969, after a fellow Christian Brother got sick at the Brothers’ school in Bluefield, Nicaragua, “Hermano Santiago” was sent to replace him. For four-plus years, he taught sixth grade, then high school, while also repairing the residence, running a bookstore and starting a soccer team. In 1974, Brother James was transferred to Puerto Cabezas where, as director of the school, he catalyzed an increase of enrollment from 300 to 800 students, helped build an industrial arts complex, offices, an auditorium and science center, taught, founded a volunteer fire department and served as janitor, fixing the plumbing, cleaning the bathrooms and sweeping the floor. His practical know-how won the attention of the Somoza Government, who contracted him to build ten more schools in the rural region so that the children of the area would have a chance at an education. When the Sandinistas took over the country, because of his having erected schools for the Somoza government and his general work of education and care for the human dignity of people long neglected, he was put on a list of those to be “dealt with.” His superiors therefore decided to summon him back to Cretin High School in Minnesota. He feared that the people of Puerto Cabezas would see his departure as an act of cowardice and so he wrote them telling them he would return, but he never got his wish. After two years of trying to return to Latin America, his superiors sent him to their Mission in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, to teach at the Indigenous House School and work at the Indian Center, training indigenous Mayans in agricultural techniques, leadership skills and basic educational subjects. St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle had told his spiritual sons, “Your zeal must go so far that you are ready to give your life, so dear to you are the children entrusted to you,” and Hermano Santiago took his founder’s instruction to heart. His new assignment was as dangerous as the one in Nicaragua. The Guatemalan government regularly conscripted indigenous students, even though they were exempt by law, into service. The government resented the Christian Brothers’ constantly appearing to present documentation to liberate their students. Word quickly spread that members of the G-2 death squad were looking for the “sub-director,” Brother James’ office at the school. He well knew the danger, but responded with humor, realism and faith. When asked if he were afraid, he replied, “Are you kidding? I never thought I could pray with such fervor when I go to bed!” He wrote his sister a month before he died, “One of two frightening things could happen to me in Guatemala: I could be kidnapped, tortured and killed or I could simply be gunned down.” He added, however, “You don’t think about that, that’s not why you’re there. There’s too much to be done. You can’t waste your energies worrying about what might happen. If it happens, it happens.” He insisted, “I pray to God for the grace and strength to serve Him faithfully among the poor and oppressed in Guatemala. I place my life in His Providence. I place my trust in Him.” On Saturday, February 13, 1982, after returning with students from a picnic, Brother Fix-It mounted a ladder to repair a broken lamp on the outer wall of the school. At 4:15 pm, four hooded men, whom the government would later call “subversive criminal elements,” sped past in a car with windows down and submachine guns loaded. They shot Hermano Santiago seven times in the neck and chest, as shocked children looked on from a window in the school. He fell from the ladder, dead. His funeral was held first in Huehuetenango and then in St. Paul, Minnesota, before he was buried in Ellis, Wisconsin, at a cemetery just outside the family farm. At his beatification on the Huehuetenango soccer field, Cardinal Lacunza called him a “martyr, an excellent educator and an evangelical defender of the poor and oppressed” who “made himself one of us and for us gave his life.” He suggested that Hermano Santiago died in witness of Christ’s great commission to teach all nations and was an icon of Christ the Teacher who died to give witness to the truth. “There is nothing that bothers totalitarianisms … more than education,” Lacunza said, since the greatest way to ensure that people remain docile to manipulation is by keeping them “ignorant, without criteria or values.” If education is subversive to tyrants, the Gospel is even more of a threat. One of the Christian brothers who had known Blessed James throughout his religious life said he loved to do things “very quietly, behind the scenes,” and “never asked for recognition.” Now, all he did has come to the foreground, with his having received the most important acknowledgment a human being can. His beatification shows that the Lord continues to exalt the humble. It also shows that the greatest in the kingdom of heaven remain those who keep the faith and teach others to do the same. He persevered until the end, fought the good fight, finished the race and kept the faith — and he trained not only his students but the whole Church to do the same. He was a person for others, a suitable helper, willing and able to give his life. He was a man of great faith that led him to do everything he can for those whom he was sent to serve. He shows us Catholic Social teaching in action and the heroism of a man made in the image of Christ, the image of the eternal Father.
• “It is not good for man to be alone.” And the suitable help God made for Adam was not just Eve. God made himself a suitable helper, entering into the human race, in order by his humanity to restore us to the divine image and make us partakers in his divinity. And where he carries that out each day most is at the altar. We know that Jesus in the Gospel quoted the words of the Book of Genesis after Adam rejoiced at the creation of his wife, “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one flesh.” St. Paul, after citing that phrase, tells us in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians “This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.” Human marriage is based on Christ’s marriage to his Bride the Church; because Christ will never abandon us, sacramental marriage is indissoluble; because Christ is faithful, human marriage is faithful; because Christ’s marriage with us is fruitful, generating newborn Christians in the baptismal womb of the Church, so human marriage increases and multiplies. To understand what happens in the Eucharist, we need to look at it in this spousal key. The early Christians used to illustrate this reality between marriage and the Eucharist in their architecture, covering the altars with a baldachin just like ancient beds were covered, to communicate that the altar is the marriage bed of the union between Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Church. It’s on this altar that we, Christ’s bride, in the supreme of love, receive within ourselves the body, the blood, of the divine Bridegroom, becoming one-flesh with him and made capable of bearing fruit with him in acts of love. This is the means by which we enter into one flesh union with Christ. This is the way by which we receive within Christ’s love for us and become more capable of sharing that type of love with each other. Here at this marriage bed, Jesus will give us, his bride and fitting helper, something far greater than what he gave the Canaanite woman Today Jesus is going to let us have far more than crumbs, he’s about to give his whole body, blood, soul and divinity. This is the means by which we will be able to grow into the types of persons like Blessed James, Hermano Santiago, who today, tomorrow and increasingly each day, Jesus will be able to say to us, O Woman, O Man, “great is your faith!”

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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