Becoming Truly Rich, 29th Monday (II), October 21, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed Giuseppe “Pino” Puglisi, Martyr
October 21, 2024
Eph 2:1-10, Ps 100, Lk 12:13-21

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel, there is a huge contrast between two types of riches, two types of inheritance, two types of legacy, one very often sought by those who are spiritually worldly, the other counseled by Jesus; one ultimately a patrimony of monopoly money, the second an endowment of God. It’s important for us to enter into this scene which is as relevant today as it was what someone in the crowd shouted the question to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” Jesus’ response to the man’s request for Jesus to command his brother to give him his share of the inheritance is, “Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?” Jesus didn’t come from heaven to earth to settle inheritance disputes but to make us aware of a totally different type of inheritance. He was the one who told the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which begins with a hunger for an inheritance that leads one to treat his father as if he were already dead. All sin can be summarized in a sense by a desire to place possessions, or money, or the things of this world, and ultimately oneself over other people, including one’s family members. St. Paul would say that “love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Tim 6:10). Jesus gives today an important antidote as medicine against this spirit of acquisitiveness that leads to all types of sins: “Take care to guard against all greed,” Jesus says, “for … one’s life does not consist of possessions.” He then tells a parable about the rich fool who was blessed with a bountiful harvest who, instead of sharing any of his good fortune with those who were hungry after the harvest of grain had filled up the barns he already had, decided to tear down his barns and build bigger ones in an unbelievable building project of selfishness. The man egocentrically said to himself, “As for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years.” He didn’t care that many others didn’t have the bare necessities. And that led to other excesses as he convinced himself to “rest, eat, drink and be merry!” Charity wasn’t even in the picture. And he had a rude awakening coming. That night he would die. “You, fool, this night your life will be demanded of you,” Jesus puts into the mouth of his Father. “And the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?” Jesus drew the moral of the story: “Thus it will be for the one who stores up treasure for himself, but is not rich in what matters to God.”
• We’re living in a culture of the grain bin. We obsess about storing treasures or even junk up for ourselves, constantly building new storage facilities to house the stuff that can no longer fit in our homes, rather than giving the stuff we don’t need away. Perhaps the most ubiquitous grain bin of all are financial portfolios, where so many focus, even sometimes obsess, about seeing them grow, while often few think nearly as much if at all about how to share those blessings with others, especially those in desperate need. To all of us in this culture, Jesus calls us to become rich in what matters to God. In the passage right after today’s section, which unfortunately is not included, Jesus tells us: “Sell your belonging and give alms. Provide money bags for yourselves that do not wear out, an inexhaustible treasure in heaven that no thief can reach nor moth destroy. For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”
• How do we become rich what matters to God? St. Paul tells us in today’s first reading from his Letter to the Ephesians: divine mercy. St. Paul highlights the richness of God’s mercy by contrasting it, first, to our condition when God acted with mercy. We “were dead in [our] transgressions and sins in which [we] once lived following the age of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the desires of our flesh, following the wishes of the flesh and the impulses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest.” Our transgressions and sins had separated us from the life of God because we were seeking other things than God, we were following the desires of the flesh instead of the spirit, we were vulnerable to the “ruler of the power of the world and the spirit at work in the disobedient,” namely the devil, and we were children living in anger like everyone else, rather than living with God’s mercy. But God acted. St. Paul describes it: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ …  and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” God has showered us with the abundance of his mercy, raised us from the death to which sin leads, brought us already in embryo to eternal life, and wants through us to manifest the immeasurable riches of his mercy to the world. These are the “good works that God has prepared in advance” for us, this is the reason why we are his “handiwork” and God wants us to “live in them.” We come to life precisely by accomplishing the works of mercy God has created us to accomplish, paying forward the mercy we have received.  To be truly rich is to be like God and God is supposed to be our inheritance and our treasure. As we pray in Psalm 16, “You are my inheritance, O Lord!” “I say to the Lord, you are my Lord, you are my only good. … You, Lord, are my allotted portion and my cup. … Fair to me indeed is my inheritance.”
• Today we celebrate a saint who took this inheritance seriously, who sought to become rich in what matters, and who sought in the most challenging of circumstances to help others stop “following the wishes of the flesh and the impulses” under the sway of the devil. St. Giuseppe “Pino” Puglisi was a pastor in Palermo, Sicily who pushed and pulled his people in a mafia-dominated neighborhood to live according to their baptism, rejecting Satan, his evil works and empty promises and live by faith in God. There’s great meaning to the fact that his feast day is not on the day he died (Sept. 15, 1993) but on the day he was baptized, since he himself sought to live in a manner worthy of his baptism. Fighting the immorality of the mafia brought him many enemies among his neighbors, parishioners and even the Church hierarchy. One Archbishop of Palermo, Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini, once even infamously asked, when queried about the mafia, whether it was a brand of detergent. Such hypocrisy led Blessed Pino to criticize the Church, but in a holy way, “like a mother,” he quipped, “not a mother-in-law.” With little support, he tried to change the mentality of his parishioners, conditioned by omertà, or a shamed silence, to give leads to authorities about the crimes of the Mafia. He refused mafia-tainted money for the Church and would not allow mafia members in his processions. On Sept. 15, 1993, the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows and his 56th birthday, he was shot outside his rectory, a hit ordered by the local mafia bosses Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano. One of the hitmen later confessed and there recalled what were Don Puglisi’s final words, “I’ve been expecting you.” His murder shocked Italy. Pope St. John Paul II eventually traveled there the following year and called him a “courageous exponent of the Gospel.” Pope Benedict decreed his martyrdom and Pope Francis authorized his beatification in May 2013, calling him, “an exemplary priest and martyr.” Blessed Pino had a famous saying, now inscribed on various walls and posters in Palermo and elsewhere, “Se ognuno fa qualcosa, allora si può fare molto,” which means, “If everyone does something, then much can be done.” If someone places his heart in true riches, if he becomes rich in God, then he can inspire many others to do so. He reminded people that God is rich in mercy and there was another way and many came to be reconciled.
• Today, as Blessed Pino did, we turn to Jesus and say, “Give me a share of your inheritance,” a portion and a cup that is not meant to remain in grain bins during our life or after we go, but one that is meant to be shared with others. As St. Paul reminds us at the end of the first reading, “We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them,” and the Mass is the greatest work of all, one that is meant to overflow, as it did in Blessed Pino’s life, into the richest way of life possible.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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