Going and Doing the Same as the Good Samaritan, 27th Monday (II), October 5, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Dedication of St. Patrick’s Cathedral
Memorial of St. Faustina Kowalska, Bl. Francis Xavier Seelos, Bl. Bartolo Longo
October 5, 2020
Gal 1:6-12, Ps 111, Lk 10:25-37

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On Saturday, in a prayer to God the Father, Jesus contrasted the “wise and the clever” from those who accept the Kingdom like like children. Today in the Gospel, we meet one of those who is “wise and clever.” A scholar of the law approaches to test Jesus about what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus flips the question around and asks the scribe from his study of the law what he thinks the answer is. He gives the same synthetic answer that Jesus would give elsewhere (Mt 22:34-40): to love God with all we have and to love our neighbor like we love ourselves. Jesus told him that he had answered correctly, but he added something else: “Do this and you will live.” It was clear that the scholar knew what needed to be done, but Jesus, seeing his heart, recognized the struggle for this scribe would have to put into practice what he knew. Salvation isn’t dependent so much on our intelligence, on what we know, but who we are, and our character is forged by our action. We see how right Jesus was in the scribe’s follow-up question. Wishing to justify himself, he asked, “And who is my neighbor?” At first glance, the question might seem one of sincere curiosity, but behind it is the premise that there are some people who are his neighbors and some who are not. The typical Jews of the time thought that they were to love their neighbor and hate their enemy (Mt 5:43), that they were supposed to care for those Jews who followed the law, but cut themselves off from sinners, from Samaritans, from Gentiles and from basically everyone who didn’t toe the line. The scribe wanted to be justified in not loving certain of his neighbors. That’s why Jesus told him the Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach him who really loves his neighbor, before adding, “Go and do the same.”
• Jesus changed the way that the Scribe (and the people of the time) looked at loving our neighbor from “objectively” seeking to define who was and was not our neighbor that we should treat with love, to “subjectively” becoming a neighbor to everyone, to being willing to love and treat with mercy whomever we meet. St. John Paul II wrote in Love and Responsibility that a human being is someone to whom the only worthy response is love. That’s what it means to become a neighbor: a person who sees everyone as someone to whom one should show love and mercy, someone who recognizes everyone is in his neighborhood. This is what Jesus did to us, drawing close to us when we were dying, left in a ditch, mugged by the evil one, left for dead. He bound our wounds, carried us on his shoulders, poured his precious blood into us, brought us to the inn of the Church and promised to repay everyone who is kind to us at his second coming. And he as a Good Samaritan continues to come to us with all our wounds every morning. He wants us to follow him in loving like this.
• Insofar as we, too, need not just to love God with all we are but to become Good Samaritans to all in order to inherit eternal life, it’s important for us to enter more deeply into this parable of Jesus. Jesus describes a mugged man left in a ditch dying. A priest and a Levite journey by that route — two people who were religious, who should have been living by God’s command to love their neighbor — but, seeing the dying man, pass by the other side. Perhaps they were late for an appointment at the temple. Perhaps they didn’t want to become ritually impure by touching the man’s blood, which would mean that they would have to inconvenience themselves by taking a ritual bath. But they failed to approach. Finally a Samaritan saw him, drew near, inconvenienced himself, bathed and nursed his wounds, brought him to an inn where he cared for him all night, then paid the inn-keepers to continue caring for him promising that he would return to see whether they did so and to pay them anything extra they had spent. If Jesus were giving this parable today, instead of “Samaritan” he would have substituted “pimp,” “drug dealer,” “child molester,” “mobster” or “terrorist.” The Samaritan was the last person a Jew would have anticipated would have drawn near because of the centuries long mutual antipathy between Jews and Samaritans. Yet he did. The implication would be that if a supposedly sinful outcast like a Samaritan drew near, we should all do so. When Jesus asked the scribe who proved himself to be a neighbor to the Samaritan, he responded, “The one who treated him with mercy,” and Jesus told him to go and do the same, to treat everyone with mercy whenever we encounter someone in need. That’s the path to eternal, precisely because it’s the path of Jesus. To be a Christian means to be a Good Samaritan. It means to draw near. It means to cross the road. It means to act with mercy. The Kingdom of God Christ came to establish is a Kingdom of Good Samaritans in which we recognize we’re our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and readily — not just out of duty but out of genuine, sincere neighborly love — tend to the wounds those around us have. The more we ponder Jesus’ own wounds in his sacred humanity, the more straightforward this becomes. When we contemplate with faith and real love Jesus’ suffering, when we see his scourge marks, when we look at the nail marks and his bleeding head and bloody eyes, we can’t help but become like Veronica and Simon of Cyrene. Then we’re able to see Christ in the distressing disguise of those who likewise are beaten down by the world, who are hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need (Mt 25:31-46). And we draw near to care for the One who drew near to care for us. On this day in which we mark here in the Archdiocese of New York the feast of the Dedication of St. Patrick’s Cathedral as a sign of the whole Archdiocese, it’s a reminder to us that the Church exists first as a house of prayer where we can love God with all we are and have, and it’s also a launching pad to send us out to love our neighbor by drawing near with Christ-like compassion.
• Pope Francis used the image of the Good Samaritan to ground his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, which he signed on Saturday in Assisi and published yesterday. After retelling Jesus’ story, he asked, “Which of these characters [in the Parable] do you resemble? We need to acknowledge that we are constantly tempted to ignore others, especially the weak. Let us admit that, for all the progress we have made, we are still ‘illiterate’ when it comes to accompanying, caring for and supporting the most frail and vulnerable members of our developed societies. We have become accustomed to looking the other way, passing by, ignoring situations until they affect us directly. Someone is assaulted on our streets, and many hurry off as if they did not notice. People hit someone with their car and then flee the scene. Their only desire is to avoid problems; it does not matter that, through their fault, another person could die. All these are signs …  of an unhealthy society, a society that seeks prosperity but turns its back on suffering.” But the Parable also offers us the hope of a better way. “The parable eloquently presents the basic decision we need to make in order to rebuild our wounded world. In the face of so much pain and suffering, our only course is to imitate the Good Samaritan. … The parable shows us how a community can be rebuilt by men and women who identify with the vulnerability of others … and act … as neighbors, lifting up and rehabilitating the fallen for the sake of the common good. The parable … speaks to us of an essential and often forgotten aspect of our common humanity: we were created for a fulfillment that can only be found in love. … Jesus concludes the parable by saying: ‘Go and do likewise’ (Lk 10:37). In other words, he challenges us to put aside all differences and, in the face of suffering, to draw near to others with no questions asked. … So this encounter of mercy between a Samaritan and a Jew is highly provocative; it … challenges us to expand our frontiers. It gives a universal dimension to our call to love.”
• To live up to this vocation, we need God’s help. As St. Paul will teach us in his letter to the Galatians over the course of the next nine weekdays, God always supplies the grace we need to live up to everything to which he calls us. He calls us not to forsake the Gospel Christ has announced to us for “another Gospel,” not to water down the call, not to pretend as if we can just love those we choose to be our neighbors, not pretend as if we can love “enough.” Jesus, who summons us to be true neighbors to those in need, to cross the road, to be filled with compassion, doesn’t leave us on our own to do so, but wants to strengthen us and help us to “go and do the same.”
• Today the Church marks the feast of three people who responded to that help and went and did as the Good Samaritan, bringing the message and example of God’s mercy to so many others. 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 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.” They were so wise and clever in not accepting someone like Faustina that they were rejecting not only a future saint but also the One who had sent her and would choose her to be the means by which he would make his mercy more greatly known. 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 as Good Samaritan caring for their souls 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 wants to heal us by his Blood and take us through the Church to the heavenly Inn of his Father.
• Today the Church in the U.S. likewise celebrates 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 as a Good Samaritan he 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)!
• Finally today the Church also marks the feast of Blessed Bartolo Longo (1841-1926), a privileged recipient of the mercy of the Good Samaritan 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 Good Samaritan 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 and give him absolution. 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 as a Good Samaritan in the Neapolitan Hospital for Incurables. He prayed. He became a third-order Dominican. He made a promise of celibacy to serve God 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.”
• All three, in different ways, went and did as Jesus taught in today’s Gospel. As we prepare to offer to the eternal Father his beloved Son’s body, blood, soul and divinity, in expiation for our sins and those of the whole world, we thank him for the gift of his Mercy, incarnate in his Son, we thank him for sending him to us when we were in the ditch, and we ask, as we prepare to receive him, to help us to love Him as he deserves — with our life, our soul, our all — and to love our neighbor just as he does, so that, like Saint Faustina, Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos and Blessed, Bartolo Longo we may offer our body, our blood, our lives to lift them from the Road to Jericho and accompany them all the way to the celestial Jerusalem.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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