Converting to Choose the One Thing Necessary, 27th Tuesday (I), October 5, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Faustina Kowalska, Bl. Francis Xavier Seelos, Bl. Bartolo Longo
October 5, 2021
Jon 3:1-10, Ps 130, Lk 10:38-42

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s first reading, we have the famous scene of the preaching of Jonah in Nineveh, a frightening thing for him that, as we saw yesterday, got him to try to flee to the most western part of the known planet. The image was a powerful reminder to the post-exilic Jews about the rebuilding not merely of the Temple but of the faith of the Jews after the return from Babylon, which is one of the reasons why Jesus used the story of Jonah to refer to his own death and resurrection. When Jonah began to preach, there was extraordinary response. People converted on day one of hearing him say, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be destroyed.” It spread immediately through a city it would take three days to traverse, and every creature, from the King to the animals, repented in sackcloth and ashes. We should remember, when we’re intimidated to proclaim the Gospel to others, that while some may refuse and reject it, others may respond in ways far greater than we could have ever imagined. As we contemplate this scene, we should also remember how Jesus used it in the Gospel with regard to the cities of Chorazin, Capernaum and Bethsaida, reminding them that “There is a greater than Jonah here,” and summoning them to a conversion even more profound.
• That leads us to today’s Gospel, as the Lord gently brings Martha to conversion. On July 29 each year — now finally together with her siblings Mary and Lazarus! — we celebrate Saint Martha’s feast day, but she still needed conversion. While she was seeking to love the Lord, working hard to prepare a meal for him, she was “anxious and worried about many things.” Jesus reminded her, “Only one thing is necessary,” and then told her to choose that “better part” as her sister Mary had done. It’s an illustration of what Jesus affirmed in yesterday’s Gospel to the Scribe, when the Scribe said that the most important thing we have to do is to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. Often we are worried and anxious about many good things, but we have to choose the one thing necessary and better, namely, to do everything for, with, through, and in Jesus, beginning by letting him do what he wants to do in us. What Mary grasped that Martha didn’t is that Jesus had come to their home primarily to feed and not to be fed, to serve rather than to be served, and it was Mary who grasped that and sat at his feet as he not only fed her with the nourishment of his word and presence. Similarly as we look at our day and all the good things we need to do, Jesus, the-greater-than-Jonah, is calling us to remember the “one thing” and choose it. He’s calling us to unity of life. He’s summoning us to keep our attention on him, rather than on all of the other good things we we think we have to do, if we really have to do them. For all of us in our Christian lives, we are interiorly drawn and quartered by so many different aims, projects, tasks, hopes, etc. Jesus is calling us to convert to simplicity, to know that he cares for us, to know that his Father provides, to know that whatever we do, in word or in deed, we’re called to do in his name.
• Today the Church marks the feast of three people who are signs and divine instruments to us of that call to conversion and about how the Greater-than-Jonah comes to feed us with his mercy and grace so that we may be able to choose the better part.
• The first is St. Faustina Kowalska, whom Jesus called the “secretary” of Divine mercy. She received her vocation when she was a 7-year-old child, praying before the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and wanted to enter the convent after completing her schooling, but her parents refused to give permission. Her parents put her to work at 16 years old, cleaning houses to make money for the family. When she was 19 she went with her sister to a public dance in her hometown of Lodz and during the dance she had a vision of the suffering Jesus. She then ran to the cathedral where Jesus told her to leave for Warsaw immediately and join a convent. She obeyed, packing a bag that night and getting on the train, without her parents’ permission and without knowing anyone at all in Warsaw. There she entered a church and asked the priest for guidance as to what community she should join. She approached various convents only to experience rejection, that they weren’t interested in accepting “maids,” even those who might have had the vocation as a handmaid of the Lord to be a future saint! Eventually she fittingly found the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, who told her that they’d accept her provided she could pay for her habit. She worked for a year — a year! — for the money and then entered. Beginning in 1931, three years after her first vows, Jesus started to appear to her and reveal to her the message of his mercy. With faithful receptivity, she began to document this in her diary. She suffered for doing so. The first thing that happened when she said to a priest that she was receiving these messages was that she was sent to a psychiatrist. Several of the other sisters began to get jealous of her: why she was something special, when they believed they had so many more talents. But she trusted in God’s providence and in Jesus’ words. He revealed to her how often his mercy is rejected, either directly or indirectly through not opening ourselves up to its abyss. Through her, he said, he wanted to try to give people another chance. He wanted to give them the chance to run back ten times if they needed to, or seventy-times seven. The message of divine mercy he conveyed to her reemphasizes what Jesus himself had said in the Gospel, that we need his mercy, that he wants us to receive it in the way he established on Easter Sunday Evening (the Sacrament of Reconciliation and Penance), and that he wants us to share that mercy with others. It wasn’t enough for Jesus that we merely know these realities, but he wanted us to grow in veneration and love for these realities and do our part, in receiving it and helping others to receive it. That’s why he revealed to St. Faustina five practices he wanted us to engage in to grow of our recognition of how much we need his merciful love, how frequently we come to receive it, and how lavishly we receive it: to behold him in the image of divine mercy, to turn to him at the hour of mercy at 3 pm, to pray a chaplet of divine mercy on Rosary beads, to celebrate the Feast of Divine Mercy as the culmination of the Easter Octave and to prepare for it with a novena of prayer for particular classes of people, starting on Good Friday. The Divine Mercy devotion is all about Jesus’ gut-bursting mercy and how he seeks for us to be converted to it in such a way that not only we receive it but become ambassadors of that gift, that better part, to others.
• The second great witness to the call to conversion and to the better part we celebrate today is Blessed Bartolo Longo (1841-1926), a privileged recipient of God’s mercy who, thoroughly converted, wanted to bring as many people to receive it as he could, especially through the intercession of our Lady. Bartolo was born to a devout Catholic family near Brindisi, in southern Italy. He was a brilliant, though mischievous kid, who began to lose his way at the age of ten, after his mother died. His adolescence was a time of great upheaval in his country, when Garabaldi was seeking to eliminate the papal city states and unite Italy. By the time Bartolo entered the University of Naples law school, many of his professors were ex-priests preaching nationalist venom against the Church. He was quickly caught up in their fervor. “I, too, grew to hate monks, priests and the Pope,” he would write, “and in particular [I detested] the Dominicans, the most formidable, furious opponents of those great modern professors, proclaimed by the university the sons of progress, the defenders of science, the champions of every sort of freedom.” In his confusion and emptiness, without God to turn to, he began to visit some of Naples’ infamous mediums. That was his introduction into the occult. Soon, his thirst for the supernatural led him into outright Satanism, where after a period of intense study and such rigorous fasting that he was reduced to skin and bones, he was consecrated a satanic priest and promised his soul to a demon. For the next year, he began to preside over satanic services and to preach more boldly and blasphemously against God and the Church — treating them, in a diabolical reversal, as the real evils. His family back home tried to talk him about of the path he had chosen, to no avail. The began to pray and to ask for help from whoever might lend a hand. Professor Vincenzo Pepe, a solidly Catholic professor at the university, responded as a Christian ought. He began to meet with Bartolo, accosting him, “Do you want to die in an insane asylum and be damned forever?” Bartolo couldn’t ignore the psychological and physiological state he was in. Professor Pepe eventually convinced him to see a Dominican priest, who after three weeks of lengthy conversations, on the feast of the Sacred Heart in 1865, was able to welcome him back into the Church, give him absolution and bathe him in the mercy of God. To keep an eye on him, Professor Pepe allowed Bartolo to move in with him and started to surround him with faithful and dedicated Catholics. Each day for two years, as a voluntarily-imposed penance, Bartolo worked in the Neapolitan Hospital for Incurables. He prayed. He became a third-order Dominican. He made a promise of celibacy to choose God as the better part and serve him with an undivided heart. He sought to do reparation for his scandal by returning to his Satanist hangouts, holding up the Rosary and publicly renouncing his former ways. But he still despaired. He couldn’t forgive himself or see how God could ever forgive him. One day, while fulfilling some legal business in Pompeii for his client Countess Mariana di Fusco, and seeing how great was the people’s poverty, ignorance, moral corruption and dependence on witchcraft, God helped him to see both how he could be saved and how he could spend his life helping to save others. “One day in the fields around Pompeii,” he wrote, “I recalled my former condition as a priest of Satan. … I thought that perhaps as the priesthood of Christ is for eternity, so also the priesthood of Satan is for eternity. So, despite my repentance, I thought: I am still consecrated to Satan, and I am still his slave and property as he awaits me in Hell. As I pondered over my condition, I experienced a deep sense of despair and almost committed suicide. Then I heard an echo in my ear of the voice of Friar Alberto repeating the words of the Blessed Virgin Mary: ‘One who propagates my Rosary shall be saved.’ Falling to my knees, I exclaimed: ‘If your words are true that he who propagates your Rosary will be saved, I shall reach salvation because I shall not leave this earth without propagating your Rosary.’” He spent the whole rest of his life, beginning in Pompeii, propagating the Rosary and imitating the mysteries it contained. With the financial support of the Countess, he built Pompeii’s famous Basilica of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary, founded elementary schools and orphanages, inaugurated a print shop and technical school to give the children of convicted criminals the chance of a better life. He wrote books on the Rosary, composed novenas and prayer manuals. The former Satanist eventually became a friend of Pope Leo XIII, who had a great devotion to the Rosary. From Pompeii he also began the popular movement that led to the solemn dogmatic proclamation of the Assumption in 1950 and in 2002, John Paul II, inspired by him to proclaim the Luminous Mysteries, called him the “Apostle of the Rosary.” He remains one of the greatest witnesses in hagiography to the power of God’s mercy and the perpetual summons of the Greater-than-Jonah.
• Finally, the Church in the U.S. likewise celebrates today Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, who exercised and preached that very mercy God would later communicate to St. Faustina. Blessed Francis Xavier was born in Bavaria in 1819 and as a child recognized a strong desire to be a priest. Soon after meeting the Redemptorists, who have always had a special charism to bring people to conversion and to receive God’s mercy in Confession, he entered the Congregation in order to minister to German speaking immigrants to the U.S. He arrived in New York City at the age of 24 in 1843 and was eventually ordained in Baltimore. He served in Pittsburgh with St. John Neumann, who served as his spiritual director and confessor and pastoral guide, and he began to receive everyone as he would want to receive Christ, people in various languages, black and white and so much more. He served later in Baltimore, Cumberland (MD), Annapolis, and Detroit, preached Missions in Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin, before being transferred as a pastor to New Orleans, where he mercifully cared for those dying of yellow fever and contracted the disease from which he died on October 4, 1867, at the age 48. He was beatified on April 9, 2000, at a ceremony I was privilege to attend, three weeks before St. Faustina was canonized (which I was also able to attend)!
• Today we come here to sit at the feet of Jesus in the Mass, to listen to him and be fed by him, as our one thing necessary and the part better than all other parts of life combined. Here we’re strengthened by him here to go out and serve him and others with the diligence of Martha and the contemplative heart of Mary, to carry out the diakonia of divine mercy filled with the Holy Spirit and with wisdom to help bring modern Ninevehs to conversion and faith.

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