Gratitude and Ingratitude, 32nd Wednesday (I), November 13, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Francis Xavier Cabrini
November 13, 2019
Wis 6:1-11, Ps 82, Lk 17:11-19

To listen to an audio version of today’s homily, please click here: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In the scene in today’s Gospel, we encounter the one grateful leper. Why does Jesus stress that he was a Samaritan, a foreigner? Why does he emphasize that none of the Jews he had healed of leprosy returned to thank God? I think the reason is because the Jews should have been particularly well-prepared to say thanks. The Jews had so many psalms of Thanksgiving that they were regularly praying that should have made returning to thank Jesus for the miracle much easier. Is it because they were complainers, like their ancestors in the desert who complained about food much more than they thanked God for their liberation from Egypt and so many other miracles God had worked for them? Of course we don’t know why nine people who were cured of one of the worst illnesses, something that ostracized them from the community, from their families, from the Temple, when cured, failed to express gratitude for the miracle. But we have much to learn from the one who did return.
• There’s a very important dialogue of prayer that takes place in the heart of every Mass that we should ponder as to how it impacts our life. Far greater as a hymn of thanksgiving to God than the Psalms we pray together with the Jews in the Liturgy of the Hours is the Mass. In the middle of Mass, at the Preface Dialogue, the priest prays, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God,” and everyone responds, “It is right and just.” The priest then turns to God the Father and declares, “It is right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks!” It’s not only our duty — and it is a duty for us to thank the Lord who has given us life and every other blessing — but it’s also our salvation. Just as the grateful Samaritan leper today received upon his return a far greater miracle than the cure of leprosy — when Jesus told him, “Your faith has saved you” — so when we thank the Lord we are likewise introduced into the mystery of salvation by faith. But we need to be grateful to receive the gift of the Mass, because it’s only those who are grateful who can appreciate the unmerited uber-miracle of salvation. The priest also prays, “always and everywhere.” We are called to thank the Lord at all times and in every place, in the humanly happy times of births and weddings and successes, as well as in the humanly difficult times of suffering, death and failure. I like to think that the reason why the Samaritan leper returned to say thanks is because he was thanking the Lord always and everywhere, including during his leprosy, and perhaps even because of his leprosy, since that disease had brought him to confide far more in the Lord for a cure.
• For us as Catholics, it’s essential that we learn how to thank the Lord always and everywhere as a sweet duty that leads us more securely to salvation. Like the Jews in the desert, we can often be complainers, who obsess about what we don’t have rather than gratefully thank God for what we do. We can be eaten alive by envy such that even when those we love are blessed, we can be upset about it, because we personally don’t have those same blessings. If we’re not  thanking the Lord always and everywhere, however, we will often not thank him sufficiently when he does something truly spectacular for us. Like children, we may say a “quick word of thanks,” but then not really remain in a perpetual attitude of gratitude. That’s what we’re called to be as Christians, people who are constantly thanking God for the gift of our faith, of Creation, of Redemption, of his Son in the Sacraments, of the ability to pray, of the opportunities for us to love others, of the promise of heaven, of our family members, of our fellow Christians, of our Pope, and so many other things.
• We become a person who thanks God always and everywhere — and learns how to thank others too! — through prayer. Many think that some people are born naturally bubbly and grateful and that others are born with bad digestion such that they’re regularly complaining. Others say certain cultures are more expressively grateful and others are more stern and moaning. It’s not principally a thing of temperament or culture, however. I think it begins with our prayer. In our prayer, do we spend the majority of our time praising and thanking God, or do we spend it begging for mercy, or do we spend it asking for things for others or ourselves, or do we spend it whining? The majority of our time in prayer should be in praise and thanksgiving if we’re ever going to be able to thank God always and everywhere. That’s a habit we need to form, in which we count our blessings and thank God for each of them. The more we do so, the more we see these blessings, and the more we acquire that attitude of gratitude that is essential for someone who is fully Catholic.
• Today in the Book of Wisdom, God tells us that he holds to a greater responsibility those to whom he has given more. He reminds kings and magistrates that he will hold them to a more “rigorous scrutiny,” and so challenges them to desire and long for his words, be instructed in them, and keep holy his precepts in order to become holy. His words and precepts are a great blessing for us and must be a source of blessing. Likewise more broadly, we who have received the greatest blessings in the world — which are not mansions and lands and bank accounts, but the Sacraments, Sacred Scripture, and faith — will be held to a more rigorous scrutiny of how grateful we are for these gifts that are so much more valuable even than a cure from leprosy. God will give us all the grace we need to meet those higher standards of thanksgiving, but we need to desire and long for those graces and be grateful for them when they come.
• I think it’s also important to highlight something else from today’s Gospel. That just as only one out of ten returned to thank God, so often when we do good to others, others will often treat us with ingratitude. Just as people don’t thank God for miracles, we shouldn’t be surprised if often we don’t receive gratitude for our actions. We do need to be prepared for that, so that, first, we’re grateful when someone has the character to say a word of appreciation, and two, we’re grateful for when someone doesn’t acknowledge what we’ve done, so that we can give all of the glory to God and unite ourselves to Christ more deeply in relating to what he himself does not receive.
• These lessons about gratitude and ingratitude are a healthy key for us to look at the life of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini whom the Church celebrates today. She lived and worked for part of her life here in New York and is buried here in New York. She’s been in the news lately after New York City first lady Chirlane McCray’s She Built NYC commission was trying to remedy the situation that only five out of the city’s 150 statues depict women and so sponsored a survey to propose statues of women who really built the city. 320 women were nominated and Mother Cabrini received far more support than any other nominee, but McCray, but McCray decided to ignore the nomination and even nominate someone who was transgender. In this little controversy into which Governor Cuomo stepped in, promising the State’s support for a statue to St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, we see the lessons of gratitude and ingratitude at work: how many remain grateful to God and to St. Frances Xavier Cabrini for her work among the immigrants of this city, and how many remain ungrateful to God and to her for that work.
• St. Frances Xavier Cabrini was born in 1850 near the Italian city of Lodi. From her earliest days, she had a deep love for the faith and a deep desire to spread it as a missionary. The youngest of 13 children, her family would read each night from the Annals of the Propagation of the Faith and her young heart became inflamed. She used to make paper boats, fill them with flowers symbolizing the flourishing life of missionaries, and float them down the river, hoping that they would reach China. After the death of both of her parents when she was 18, she applied to enter various religious communities —including those who ran the school from which she graduated — but was refused because her health was poor. Such communities were not truly grateful to have a future saint apply, but just saw her physical ailments. Eventually her parish priest, who appreciated her piety, zeal and organizational ability, asked her to help save a mismanaged orphanage. She assented and did all she could, forming around her a community of women to assist in the work of loving these orphans into the kingdom, but after three years of hard work the charitable institution was not able to be resuscitated. But it was through that grain of wheat’s falling to the ground that Frances’ life-long aspiration was able to be fulfilled. Her bishop summoned her and said, “I know you want to be a missionary. Now is the time. I don’t know any institute of missionary sisters, so found one yourself.” And with the group of seven women who had collaborated with her at the orphanage, she did: the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, erected to seek the Christian education of girls. It was suggested to her by many that her new community should head to the United States to work among the Italian immigrants. In the 1880s, there were 50,000 Italians in New York City alone, but fewer the 1,200 had ever been to a Mass or learned the elements of Christian doctrine. They didn’t know how to make the Sign of the Cross. Ten of the 12 priests working among them had been kicked out of their Italian dioceses for problems. Archbishop Corrigan of New York wrote her a formal letter asking her assistance, but at first she wouldn’t hear of it. She had set her heart on evangelizing China. But one night she had a powerful dream that induced her to consult Pope Leo XIII himself. The holy and wise pontiff, after hearing of the dream and her discernment, told her, in words that would change the history of Catholicism in America, “Not to the East, but to the West.” With six of her sisters, she set off for New York in 1889.
• When they arrived, a poor, humbling and ungrateful reception awaited them. They had been asked initially to organize an Italian orphanage and elementary school, but during their voyage, the benefactress underwriting the institutions had reneged on her commitments. There was no place for them or the orphans to live and no building for them to hold classes. Archbishop Corrigan told Mother Cabrini it was probably best for her and her sisters to return to Italy. Despite her disappointment at the chaos she found in New York, this tiny, strongly-accented Lombardian replied with a determination that ever after impressed the prelate, “No. The pope sent me here, and here I must stay.” From that point forward, Mother took some matters into her own hands. She went to see the benefactress to persuade her to change her mind, brought about her reconciliation with the archbishop, founded a house for the sisters and successfully began the orphanage. She began to receive vocations to her community almost immediately and that allowed her community’s apostolate to spread far and wide. She soon opened up a hospital in New York and several institutions in New Orleans, where the integration of Italians was going particularly poorly. Requests for her help were coming from all over the world, and she traveled with sisters to open up homes, schools, hospitals and orphanages in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, France and England. She also founded institutions in most American cities where there was a heavy concentration of Italian immigrants. By 1907, when the constitutions of her community were finally approved, there were more than a thousand sisters working in over fifty institutions in eight countries. She died ten years later at the age of 67 while visiting her community in Chicago and in 1946, she became the first American citizen to be canonized a saint. Her future canonization had been foretold by Pope Leo XIII fifty years before when, asked about her, he replied, “Mother Cabrini is a woman of fine understanding and great holiness. She is a saint.” Mother Cabrini’s zeal for the faith and her sanctity were seen in her willingness to put out into the deep waters and lower her nets for a catch for Christ all over the globe. As a little girl, she had fallen into a river and almost drowned. Despite her fear of water from that point forward, she spent much of her adult life aboard ship sailing across rough seas — 30 cross Atlantic trips — or over rivers to open schools for the fish she and her community would catch in those nets. She models for us the courage and creativity needed to see and spread the faith. We give particular thanks for her today.
• The greatest way we learn to become people of Thanksgiving is through praying the Mass aright. The Greek word for Eucharist means Thanksgiving, and this is the great prayer of Thanskgiving that we pray together with Christ to the Father. I’ve always been struck by the words of consecration. “At the time he was betrayed, … Jesus took bread, and giving thanks … said, ‘… This is my body … given…  for you.’” “In a similar way, when supper was ended, he took the chalice and once more giving thanks, gave it to his disciples, saying, … ‘This is the chalice of my blood.’” Jesus was able to give thanks even on the eve of his crucifixion! Jesus was able to give thanks for the opportunity to offer his body and blood for us and our salvation! If he can give thanks in these circumstances, then we can not only learn from him in the Mass, but receive his very help, so that we, too, may give the Father thanks always and everywhere. That is our blessed duty and our salvation.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
WIS 6:1-11