Glorification, Seventh Tuesday of Easter, May 26, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Seventh Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Philip Neri
May 26, 2020
Acts 20:17-38*, Ps 68, Jn 17:1-19*

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• During the second half of the Easter Season, we focus on Jesus’ words during the Last Supper taken from the Gospel of John. For the past several weeks we have been pondering what we could call Jesus’ instructions to the apostles: for example, his washing the disciples’ feet to give us the example of washing other’s feet; his words about loving others as he has loved us; remaining attached to him the Vine and in him to the other branches; the suffering we’ll have to endure to give witness to Christ; the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and what the Holy Spirit will do. Today he continues to teach but he teaches us mystagogically, not pedagogically, as he prays and allows us to eavesdrop and enter into his prayer. It’s been called his great priestly prayer and in it we see why Jesus was living. He was living to glorify the Father. He asked God the Father to glorify him so that he could in turn glorify the Father. He glorified the Father by accomplishing the work the Father had given him to do, the work of revealing the Father’s love to the extreme in saving his sons and daughters. He also glorified the Father by leaving the disciples in the world so that they in turn could continue that saving work. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus, the Light of the World, said that his disciples would reflect his light and that others, in seeing their good deeds of love, would glorify God the Father in heaven. The greatest glorification of God the Father would take place when Jesus was exalted on the Cross. And the most luminescent, greatest deed of all is when we are lifted up on the Cross with Jesus, when we are willing to lay down our lives out of love for others, in simple deeds all the way to martyrdom.
• Someone who glorified God in this way and led many others to do so is St. Paul. Today we have his valedictory address to the Church in Ephesus, meeting with them at the port of Miletus. He describes his sufferings, tears and trials, the imprisonments and hardships that he endured and those that still awaited him, but through all of it, he says, he “did not shrink from telling you what was for your benefit,” “from proclaiming to you the entire plan of God,” from “bear[ing] witness to the Gospel of God’s grace, doing so in the square and in private, “in public or in your homes.” As he said to the Romans elsewhere, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel,” because he thought the whole Gospel was “good news” with power to save, and he wanted everyone else to know the truth that would set them free. Everything was with that goal in mind, to proclaim the full Gospel of God, including and especially the Cross. We spoke last week that he did not preach on the Cross in Athens, but when he arrived in Corinth, he resolved to know nothing but the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and to preach it as God’s power and wisdom. Later, he would write to the Galatians that he glories in nothing but the Cross, by which the world has been crucified to him and him to the world. He would go so far as to say he had been crucified — glorified — with Christ and the life he now lives, he lives by faith in the Son of God who loved him and gave his life for him. He proves Jesus’ point about those disciples in the world glorifying both the Son and the Father, as his whole post-conversion life bore this witness.
• Today the Church celebrates a saint whose life similarly glorified God. When St. Philip Neri arrived in Rome in 1533 as an 18 year-old layman, the eternal city was in multiple levels of devastation. Most of the people were still in trauma from Charles V’s brutal ransacking of the city in 1527. The Renaissance had led to the rediscovery of much of pagan literature and with it, the intellectual and cultured classes had readopted pagan rituals and practices. The Church was in almost total disarray. Several of the Renaissance popes lived more in disgrace than grace. Cardinals were appointed not because of their holiness or sacred leadership but because of their bank accounts and bloodlines. Many pastors, desiring to live leisurely, subcontracted the care of souls to those who were unfit. The challenges that confronted Philip would make the serious issues we face today — the residue of so much bloodshed, two world wars, the sexual revolution, a distorted notion of freedom, the redefinition of marriage — seem comparatively almost idyllic. Yet, by his death in 1595, this vast metropolis had, to a large degree, returned not just to the practice of the faith but to fervent, joy-filled practice of the faith. What did St. Philip do to help turn it around? How did he seek to glorify God?
• He did so by calling people to good deeds. Philip would go up to people on the streets, joke and laugh with them, win them over by his jovial goodness and ask, “Brothers, when are we going to start to do good?” He sought to help them, through deeds, give glory to the Father in heaven. He invited his new friends to help him in caring for the sick. They would volunteer each day as orderlies in hospitals, cleaning and changing patients, feeding them, and often preparing them for death. Medical care and sanitation are still problems in Italian public hospitals today; they were little more than germ factories in the 16th century. Philip and his friends, however, brought the Good Samaritan’s love to those whom few in society were willing to care for. And that started to transform all those who did it, and they saw the fruit of joy that comes from sincere loving. He also sought to help them come to know God better so that God’s own glory could reign in them. Philip would get all his friends together for brief talks in his apartment on the lives of the saints and martyrs, on Church history, and on various applications of the faith to daily life. He would give many of the talks himself — which created a stir since he was at the time a layman — and invite others whom he thought capable to do the same. Later, these would develop into what he called the little Oratory, where everyone from the poor and illiterate to cardinals and Rome’s rich, famous and cultured would sit side-by-side. He gave them a new culture that would help them turn their lives over to the “cult” or worship of God. You can’t replace something with nothing, and Philip knew that to draw the young away from pagan practices like the Saturnalia, there needed to be fun and attractive adventures of faith. So he started pilgrimages to the seven ancient basilicas in Rome, 40 hour devotions, musical groups and more. He helped them to see that these sanctuaries were their spiritual patrimony, the saints were their brothers and sisters in the faith, and that the spiritual treasures were their family heirlooms. That began to change the way they looked at what so many took for granted. They began to hunger for God’s glory as he did. He formed lay men and women so that they could go out and evangelize others and transform culture and society. They would read together St. Francis Xavier’s letters from India and resolve to make Rome their Indies and win it back for Christ. Philip knew that, without the laity, there was little chance priests and religious alone could turn around Rome. This novel approach of lay involvement would bring him to the attention and, for a time, discipline of the Inquisition. He was centuries ahead of his time. But it’s the same thing for us. If we’re going to turn around our culture, we need to focus on forming the people who are already coming so that they can go, with the Holy Spirit’s power, out as salt, light and leaven to turn around the face of the earth. And he did all of this by the power of the Holy Spirit, to whom we are praying in a particular way during this Decenarium. On the vigil of Pentecost in 1544, when he was 28, as he was in the catacombs imploring the Holy Spirit to give him the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23), he saw the third person of the Trinity take on the appearance of a ball of fire that entered his mouth, descended to his heart and caused an explosion of heat and love that an autopsy later demonstrated had broken outward two of his ribs and almost doubled the size of his heart. St. Paul once wrote to the Romans, “The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us,” and that was literally true for St. Philip. For the rest of his life, the fire burned both spiritually and physically, so that no matter how cold outside he needed to have the windows open. People could hear his heart beating across Churches. He became a living example of each of the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-mastery. His docility to what God the Holy Spirit wanted to do in him and through him not only led to his becoming one of the greatest saints of all time but also to his helping vast multitudes respond to the sanctifying work of the same Holy Spirit. In the Collect beginning this Mass we begged for the same miraculous transformation: “O God, who never cease to bestow the glory of holiness on the faithful servants you raise up for yourself, graciously grant that the Holy Spirit may kindle in us that fire with which he wonderfully filled the heart of St. Philip Neri.” St. Philip attained the glory of holiness and wanted to help his contemporaries do so, because there’s no great glory given to God than to allow God’s own holiness to radiate in human beings.
• The place where we enter the school of the glorification of God each day is the Mass. It’s here where Jesus prayed to the Father that He would glorify the Son so that the Son would glorify him, and where that glorification was advanced as Jesus was exalted on Golgotha. We come here to glorify God, to hear Jesus announce to us his words, to allow him to accomplish his work of salvation, to consecrate us within his own consecration to the Father on the altar, to make us one body, one Spirit in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. So great was St. Philip’s love for the Mass, so great was his penetration of the Mass, that whenever he began to think about it, he would go into ecstasy and even, some said, would levitate. His double-size heart would become like a hot-air balloon lifting him up toward God. For that reason, in preparation for Mass, he would have read to him joke or comic books to keep him from not entering into ecstatic prayer. Later on in life, when he was no longer able to celebrate public Masses, the server wound extinguish the candles after the consecration of the Precious Blood and come back two hours later, light the candles, pull on Philip’s chasuble and help him finish the Mass. Now he shares in the fulfillment of the Mass in the glory of the Saints, where he prays for us to join him.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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