Living Faith’s Practical Consequences, 13th Thursday (I), July 6, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Corpus Christi Basilica, Kazimierz, Kraków, Poland
Thursday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Maria Goretti
July 6, 2023
Gen 22:1-19, Ps 115, Mt 9:1-8

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The Tertio Millennio Seminar is not just a time for us to get to know our Catholic faith much more in depth, but to help us to see and live its practical consequences with greater fervor and fidelity. Today’s readings from Sacred Scripture, this renowned Basilica in which we’re celebrating Mass and the great young saint we remember liturgically today all help us to ponder and make more practical four different aspects of our life of faith.
• In the first reading, we see the culmination of Abraham’s great life of faith. By faith, we remember, at 75 years old, he packed up everything he owned and with his family set out to a place God would later show him; he didn’t know the destination but trusted in the Lord and was willing to go wherever the Lord would lead him. By faith, even though he and his wife Sarah were geriatric and childless trusted not only that they would conceive a child, but that through that child he would become the father of many nations, with children as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore. God had him look up into the heavens to count the stars and, as Genesis says a few verse later, dusk came, meaning that Abraham was counting the stars while the sky was still blue. Just as he knew the stars were there even though he couldn’t see them with his physical eyes, so he trusted that his descendants would likewise be there. By faith, he trusted in the Lord’s promise even when the Lord would make him wait not just nine months for a child, not just nine years, but 24 years until Isaac, the son of promise, would be conceived. And in today’s Gospel, we see supreme test of Abraham’s faith, which is shown in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, that son of the promise, at God’s direction. He was willing to do something so contrary to paternal love because he believed, as the letter to the Hebrews would later tell us, that even should Isaac be slain, God would necessarily raise him from the dead, since God had promised that Isaac would be the one through whom Abraham would become the father of many nations. This was 18 centuries before Jesus’ resurrection. We learn in the life of Abraham that faith means trusting in the Lord even when he asks us to journey, to believe beyond what we know of by biology, to be patient, and to be willing to sacrifice even what we hold dearest because we love God above all things.
• In the Gospel, we see another aspect of the gift of faith in the four friends of the paralyzed man, who, believing in Jesus, struggled to carry him on a stretcher to Jesus. We don’t know how far they needed to carry him in Capernaum, but no matter the distance, it wasn’t easy work; when they got to the house and saw how packed it was, out of love for their friend and faith in Jesus, rather than waiting, they did the very complicated maneuver of lifting their paralyzed pal up onto the roof, as we see in St. Mark’s and St. Luke’s accounts. They needed to keep their paraplegic or quadriplegic friend balanced as they lifted him up and then down, lest he fall on his head to greater injury or worse. What a scene the whole thing must have been, but they were not to be hindered or delayed.  And Jesus went far beyond what they were asking: “When Jesus saw their faith,” St. Matthew tells us, he healed the man’s sins and then healed the man’s paralysis. It’s a reminder to us that in faith we ought to be seeking to bring our friends and all their needs to the Lord to let him surpass even our hopes for them, because God always responds to our prayers, for whatever we ask for, with the supreme gift of himself. We likewise see the faith of the paralyzed man, in allowing his friends to carry him, in trusting in the one in whom they trusted even when it was personally risky, in taking courage as Jesus told him not just to trust in his mercy but also to believe in his word and rise, take up his mat himself and go home. But that’s what he did. By faith, we, too, just trust in God’s mercy and how he wishes to forgive us and heal us of whatever prevents our rising and sharing in his resurrection. In this Gospel, we see by the priority Jesus gives to forgiving his soul even before healing the paralysis of his body just how important the forgiveness of sins is in Jesus’ mission. As Pope Francis repeatedly says, everything Jesus did — preaching, teaching, healing, exorcizing — was just part of his overall mission to reconcile us to the Father through the forgiveness of our sins.
• The third aspect by which we’re called today to grow in the practical consequences of our faith is with regard to chastity. The Church celebrates today the memorial of St. Maria Goretti, who was martyred in Nettuno, Italy at the age of 11. When her 20 year old next-door-neighbor Alessandro Serenelli tried to seduce her, she said simply, “It would be a sin,” and she repeatedly refused. That was not the answer he was looking for and one day his lust got the better of him as he refused to take no for an answer. While she was baby-sitting her infant sister Teresa, Alessandro furtively approached and, after being denied again, began to rip her clothes off. When she was resisting and screaming, he began to stab her 14 times with a long awl, piercing her lungs, diaphragm, throat and heart. When she collapsed to the ground, he ran away. Teresa began to cry and when her cries didn’t abate, eventually Alessandro’s father and Maria’s mother came to see if everything was okay, and they found Maria on the floor. She was rushed to the hospital where they did surgery without anesthesia to try to stop the bleeding and repair the damage, but it was too late. Maria detailed Alessandro’s advances — she had kept them secret until then because she didn’t want to cause trouble for her family with the Serrenellis, who were their landlords — and told them what he had done that day. She said that she forgave him and wanted him to join her in heaven. She died on the following day, 121 years ago today. Alessandro was arrested, convicted and sent to prison for 30 years. He was a very bitter man. For the first three years of his incarceration, he refused all advances to help him, including from priests. But then Maria appeared to him in a dream, gave him lilies — signs of her purity as well as of her resurrection — and told him anew that she forgave him. He converted and became a totally different man. He was released after 27 years for good behavior. His first visit was to Maria’s mother Assunta to ask for her forgiveness. She said that if her daughter could forgive him, so could she, and then she brought him to Church the next day, which was Christmas Eve, and asked the whole community to forgive him — something that made it possible for him to live in their village at all. Eventually he became a Capuchin brother and lived the rest of his days in holiness. He was present at the canonization of the little girl he had tried to rape and then murdered when she was canonized by Pope Pius XII in 1950, the first canonization ever to be held outside in St. Peter’s Square because of the immensity of the crowds that wanted to be present for the ceremony. Maria Goretti is not just a witness to the mercy and forgiveness that is meant to flow from faith but also of the virtue of chastity. Her faith led her to love the Lord with ardent chastity such that she was willing to give her life out of chaste love for him. As St. Ambrose wrote in the fourth century about the virgin martyr St. Agnes and all of the other young virgin martyrs in the first centuries of the Church, “Virginity is praiseworthy not because it is found in martyrs, but because it makes martyrs.” When we believe in the Lord enough to say yes to him out of love and no to sex outside of marriage, then it makes it possible for us to say yes to him and no to denying him even in the supreme hour when threatened by death. How much our world today needs to see this aspect of faith during an age in which the devil has gotten so many addicted to sexual sins. As St. John Paul II once taught, lust — the opposite of chastity — changes the entire intentionally of a human being, from a self-giver made in the image and likeness of God, to a taker, from a self-sacrificing lover to a consumer of others for one’s one gratification, from a protector to a predator. Chastity allows us to keep our attractions to another at the level of the person’s overall good. It’s tied, he said, not just to continence or the moderation of the sexual appetite, but ultimately to purity by which we see God in others, piety by which we reverence God and others, and ultimately love. No wonder why St. Paul in his first Letter to the Thessalonians, after reminding us that God’s will for us is to become holy, immediately states, “Therefore avoid all unchastity.” Chastity, lived with faith, is what permits us to grow in the pure love that helps us to love like God.
• The fourth and the last summons we have to live by the practical consequences of our faith is with regard to the Holy Eucharist. We are in this beautiful Basilica of Corpus Christi, built by King Casimir III in 1340 over the spot where a monstrance containing the Eucharist that had been stolen by the nearby All Saints Church was discarded by robbers and eventually rediscovered at the end of the Corpus Christi novena. It’s a Basilica that was made famous by the life of Saint Stanislaw Soltys Kazimierczyk (1433-1489) who during the fifteenth century became renowned here as a confessor, as a great friend of the poor, and especially as the “Apostle of the Blessed Sacrament” as he defended the doctrine of the Real Presence of the Lord Jesus against the preachings of the Polish followers of the proto-protestants John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. He helped the people of his age grow in Eucharist knowledge, faith, amazement, love and life and to make their practical through Mass, adoration, processions and Eucharistic love for the poor. We see in the Gospels how the Eucharist requires faith; many of Jesus’ first disciples abandoned him when he told them that they needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood. “This teaching is hard,” they said, “who can endure it?” It was then that Jesus asked the apostles if they, too, were going to leave him and Peter stood up and said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” Because he trusted in Jesus, he trusted in what he said about the Eucharist, a trust that would be fulfilled exactly a year later when, during the Last Supper in the Upper Room, Jesus would take bread and wine and totally and miraculously change them into his Body and Blood, while simultaneously miraculously maintaining their appearances, and say, “Take and eat. … Take and drink.” It’s before Jesus in the Holy Eucharist each day that we, like Abraham, are given the opportunity to leave our comfort zones and follow him wherever he leads, growing in the capacity to sacrifice even what is dearest in order to obtain this pearl of great price. It’s before Jesus in the Holy Eucharist that we seek to bring our friends so that he may heal their souls and if he wills their bodies so that they may follow and love him with all their mind, heart, soul and strength. It’s Jesus in the Eucharist to which we come to be strengthened in pure and chaste love, because, as priests, religious, consecrated virgins and others show, Jesus in the Eucharist is worth giving up even the great goods of marriage and family if the Lord summons us to do so for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. It’s Jesus in the Eucharist who gives even young girls the strength to be martyrs. Exactly 13 months before she was martyred, St. Maria Goretti had received Holy Communion with intense longing. “I long for Jesus,” she was accustomed to say. Even though she was illiterate, she learned all her prayers and catechism with the help of her parish priest and a lady of the village so that she would be ready. She would receive Holy Communion every Sunday with great zeal and received Jesus for the last time in the hospital as Viaticum, “like an angel,” as those present attested, and after which, fortified, she said that she had forgiven Alessandro out of love for Jesus and prayed that God would forgive him, too. May we receive today with the faith, longing and love of St. Maria Goretti, a faith that will allow us to sacrifice like Abraham and to bring others to the Lord so that he may do in them what he did in Abraham, Maria Goretti and all the great heroes of faith!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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