Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Anthony of Padua Church, New Bedford, MA
Nuptial Mass of Daniel Bruce Marshall and Carina Ann Borges
May 14, 2022
Gen 2:18-24, Ps 34:2-9, 1 Cor 12:31-13:8, Mt 19:3-6
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
In God’s providence, there are no coincidences.
From before the foundation of the world, the same Jesus who visited a wedding in Cana of Galilee made plans for May 14, 2022, to come here to Saint Anthony of Padua Parish in New Bedford, to unite you, Daniel Bruce Marshall and Carina Ann Borges, in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony.
He formed each of you, just as much as he did Adam and Eve in today’s first reading, to be a “suitable partner” for each other.
He created you “from the beginning” so that you would leave your father and mother and cling to each other and become, by his power, no longer two but one flesh, in an indissoluble reality that no human being — or even all other human beings on the planet — will ever be able to separate.
He who brought you together, as an organist and a cantor, to provide music for the 2017 Diocese of Fall River Pro-Life Bootcamp, wants to help you continue to accompany each other and make beautiful music in a liturgy of life. This is the means by which, as we sung in today’s Psalm, you may together magnify the Lord, glorify and bless him at all times with his praise always in your mouth, savoring how good the Lord is, radiant with joy.
He knew, as you know, and as St. Paul reminds us in today’s epistle, that without the love he has placed in you for each other, your life, rather than becoming a canticle of self-giving, echoing the spousal love song of creation and redemption, might have ended up being just a “noisy gong and clashing cymbal.”
In God’s plan there are no coincidences and part of the complementary vocation he has given you to the Sacrament of Marriage involves his joining you on May 14.
In your plans, May 14 was chosen because it was the closest Saturday to May 13, the Memorial of Our Lady of Fatima, who began appearing to the three shepherd children in the Cova d’Iria on that day in 1917. It was God who inspired in you that desire and love for our Lady, who, in her final appearance on October 13, 1917 (exactly one hundred years before your first unofficial date!) came together with St. Joseph holding the child Jesus as the baby Jesus was blessing the 70,000 present. This happened, as Lucia dos Santos, one of the three shepherd children, later commented, to show the importance of the family by presenting before the world the model of the Holy Family of Nazareth. “God,” she wrote, “entrusted to the family the sacred mission of co-operating with Him in the work of creation, … a sacred mission that makes two beings one in a union so close that it does not admit of separation… [and from which] God wishes to produce other beings.” In a letter to one of my professors in Rome, the future Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, Lucia made plain just how important the family is in the plans of God, for which she believed Our Lady of Fatima appeared to appeal to us to take more seriously. “The final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about Marriage and the Family,” she firmly stated. “This is the decisive issue.”
And so it is beautiful, inspiring, and wise for you to want to consecrate your marriage today to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart, to become warriors within the Church militant in that final battle between God and Satan, sanctity and sin, love and envy, life and death. Indeed, marriage and the family, made in God’s image and likeness, the icon of the union between Christ and his Bride the Church, is the arena in which everything will be decided and, as St. John Paul II taught, the future of humanity will pass.
As important as Our Lady of Fatima is to both of you, however, you are getting married by God’s providence not on May 13th, but May 14th. Every anniversary you will celebrate — your first and perhaps even your 75th and beyond, we pray, at the eternal nuptial banquet — will take place, by God’s design, on May 14, the Feast of the Apostle Saint Matthias. On those anniversaries, beyond giving flowers or gifts or sharing a great meal, I hope that you will come to Mass, with the children we pray God will give you, to thank God for the gift of your marriage, to receive his blessing, and there celebrate with the whole Church the feast of the apostle chosen to take Judas’ place. Therefore, it is fitting, alongside your devotion to Our Lady, to develop an ardent love for Saint Matthias and a desire to live in your marriage the lessons God teaches us through him.
You remember the story of Saint Matthias. Right after the Ascension and while the Church was huddling around our Lady praying for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, Saint Peter stood up among the 120 disciples and said that they had to replace the one who had betrayed the Lord Jesus. “It is necessary,” he said, “that one of the men who accompanied us the whole time the Lord Jesus came and went among us… become with us a witness to his resurrection.” The qualifications were, first, someone who been with Jesus and the apostles, someone who knew him personally and not just about him second-hand; and second, someone who would become with them a witness to the resurrection, a testifier that Jesus wasn’t dead, but was very much alive. Those remain the vocational criteria and missionary task of every Christian in every age. We need to be people who know Jesus, who hear him, who see him, who touch him, who follow him, who are friends with him, and not just people who can explain his biographical info or his doctrine. Likewise, we need to be people who are able not just to tell people that he is alive, but show people he is alive by the way he vivifies us, raising us from sin and the various necroses sin assumes in human life, and filling us with the joy he entered the world to give and perfect in us.
We see that when it came time for the election of the new apostle, they nominated two candidates and allowed God to choose by lot. The candidates were Matthias and someone named Joseph also called Barsabbas (Son of the Sabbath) and Justus (the Just One). On paper, if one were choosing by human criteria, it would have seemed likely that the one who would have been selected would have been the one who had already earned two nicknames because of the way he lived the faith as a just man who loved the Sabbath day. But God’s ways are not our ways, and Matthias was the one chosen. He said yes to the call, became a witness to the Risen Jesus, and ended up giving his life in testimony not only of Jesus’ resurrection but of his faith that even after being martyred, he, too, would rise.
Why is it important to cultivate a spirituality of Saint Matthias? Because many Catholics can treat Joseph-Justus-Barsabbas as if he were their patron saint! Many Catholics can say, “Whew! Thanks be to God that God chose someone else to spread the faith so that I can just sit shyly on the sidelines!” Many Catholics don’t believe that they’ve been chosen to spread the faith and they’re happy about being supposedly overlooked. Not everyone, of course, is chosen to be a successor of the apostles, or a priest, or a religious, or even a catechist, but every Christian has been chosen by the Lord’s lot, like Matthias, to know Jesus personally, to experience his risen life, and to spread knowledge and love of him. And the history of the Church, which is part of salvation history, is the history of the transmission of the faith. Each of us is called, from one generation to the next, to pass on to others as of first importance what we ourselves have received. We are called to take the place not only of those, like Judas, who betrayed the Lord and the Gospel, but also of the other 11.
Specifically with regard to marriage, Dan and Carina, you are being called to step forward and be witnesses, through your marriage and family, of the presence of the Risen Lord Jesus, the Bridegroom of the Church. You’re being summoned to show the difference Christ makes, the love he gives, the life and joy he imparts. You are being asked to continue the work of so many holy couples that have preceded you, Saint Joachim and Anne, St. Joseph and the Blessed Mother, Saints Priscilla and Aquila, Saints Isidore the Farmer and Maria de la Cabeza, Saint Louis and Zelie Martin (the parents of St. Therese), of Blessed Luigi and Maria Quattrocchi, of St. Gianna Beretta Molla and her husband Pietro, and so many others.
With regard to marriage, we know that many couples, tragically, have gone the way of Judas, not being faithful to their vows, their spouses and the Lord. Such falls, seen, for example, in the betrayal of adultery, the violence of abuse, the tragic reality of divorce, can discourage so many of your contemporaries from taking the risk of the life-long commitment of marriage you are making today. You need, in response, to be like Saint Matthias, picking up the baton of those who are faithful, inspiring hope and confidence in others so that they, too, may seek to unite their love together with Christ in the Sacrament of Marriage.
Just as Jesus sent out the first apostles two-by-two, so today he sends you out two-by-two hand-in-hand to share the gift of the faith as a married couple. This will, of course, involved becoming the “first heralds of the Gospel” (FC 39) for your children, praying with them, reading the word of God with them and introducing them sacramental and ecclesial life. As St. John II wrote in his exhortation on the family, in words that have become more prophetic by the year, “In places where anti-religious legislation endeavors even to prevent education in the faith, and in places where widespread unbelief or invasive secularism makes real religious growth practically impossible, ‘the Church of the home’ remains the one place where children and young people can receive an authentic catechesis” (FC 53). Your mission will also involve evangelizing other families and supporting them, especially when they are experiencing worse, sicker and poorer times (FC 52). And as a domestic Church, your marriage and family are called to strengthen your parish and the Church’s whole mission within the world. As John Paul II, “The future of evangelization depends in great part on the Church of the home” (FC 53). The future of the Church’s witness to Christ depends on the Church of the new home you are forming with him and each other today.
So as you take up your vocation as marital Matthiases for the rest of your life, I’d urge you consciously to accept the graces Christ gives you today to fulfill that mission. He wants to help you become an inseparable “suitable helper” for each other in this task, clinging to each other and to him in love. He wants to help you learn in your marital love the virtues Saint Paul describes in today’s second reading, so that your proclamation of the faith, at home and outside of it, will be patient, kind, not jealous, pompous, inflated or rude, not self-seeking, quick-tempered or brooding over injury, not obsessing over others’ mistakes and sins but rejoicing with the truth, and believing, hoping and enduring all things. He wants to strengthen you, in words and actions, to bless the Lord at all times, to magnify him and exalt his name, to taste and see his goodness, and to be radiant with joy.
The same qualities you admire in each other will help make you potent evangelizers of your children, your neighbors and so many others. Carina, you told me you are amazed at Dan’s “constant generosity and self-giving qualities,” his “love for God” and for you, his patience, versatility, physical and mental strength, encouragement, respect and reverence. Dan, you told me that you are so grateful for Carina’s “extreme sense of maternal love,” her maternal warmth, beauty and the way she embraces her femininity, her serenity and calming voice, her love for the Blessed Mother, her joy at trying to do promptly what you ask no matter how busy she is. Marriage is meant to purify and elevate these gifts to overflowing. Pope Francis says that in holy marriages, “each spouse becomes a means used by Christ for the sanctification of the other” (GE 141) and since 2017 God has already been at work in your friendship sanctifying you. In the Sacrament by which he will unite you today, he will advance that work and help you, together, to become a means of the sanctification of your family and of the world.
The great means by which Christ will make you holy so that you can be his instrument of sanctification to each other, the way by which he will fill you with his love so that you can love each other as he has loved you first, the place by which you will grow in your living of the Gospel so that you can more effectively proclaim it in the midst of our increasingly secularized world is here at Mass. This is the great sacrament of love the apostle St. Matthias brought across the ancient world. This is where you receive the blessed fruit of the womb of Our Lady, the victor in the decisive battle against Satan, sin and death. This is the place where the Divine Bridegroom becomes one flesh with the Church his Bride and strengthens every married couple to witness in their marriage how to say, “This is my Body,” “This is my blood,” “This is all I am and have” given out of love for you. May the Lord who in his Providence has brought you here together on the feast of St. Matthias help you to make of your marriage a commentary on the words of consecration and the spousal love that they signify and impart.
May God bless you both and by the way you respond to that blessing bless us all!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A Reading from the Book of Genesis
The LORD God said: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him.” So the LORD God formed out of the ground various wild animals and various birds of the air, and he brought them to the man to see what he would call them; whatever the man called each of them would be its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, all the birds of the air, and all the wild animals; but none proved to be the suitable partner for the man. So the LORD God cast a deep sleep on the man, and while he was asleep, he took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. The LORD God then built up into a woman the rib that he had taken from the man. When he brought her to the man, the man said: “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; This one shall be called ‘woman,’ for out of ‘her man’ this one has been taken.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.
Taste and See the Goodness of the Lord
I will bless the LORD at all times;
praise shall be always in my mouth.
My soul will glory in the LORD
that the poor may hear and be glad.
Magnify the LORD with me;
let us exalt his name together.
I sought the LORD, who answered me,
delivered me from all my fears.
Look to God that you may be radiant with joy
and your faces may not blush for shame.
In my misfortune I called, the LORD heard
and saved me from all distress.
The angel of the LORD, who encamps with them,
delivers all who fear God.
Learn to savor how good the LORD is;
happy are those who take refuge in him.
A Reading from the First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians
Strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts. But I shall show you a still more excellent way. If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing.
A Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew
Some Pharisees approached him, and tested him, saying, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?” He said in reply, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download