Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Patrick Parish, Huntington, New York
Nuptial Mass of Joseph Peter (JP) Von Uffel and Victoria Rose Giardina
September 5, 2021
Tob 8:4-8, Ps 127:3, Eph 5:2.21-33, Mt 19:3-6
To listen to an audio recording of today’s slightly shortened homily, please click below:
To watch the first half of the wedding Mass including the homily, please click here.
The following text guided the homily:
It would have been great, if JP’s and Victoria’s original plans for us to celebrate their marriage with them in Malta had come to fruition, to be able, on that island first evangelized by Saint Paul, to enter more deeply into what God inspired the Apostle to the Nations to teach about the beauty and meaning of Christian marriage, as he does in today’s second reading from his Letter to the Ephesians.
But we can be grateful for the consequences of pandemic travel restrictions that led JP and Victoria to decide to hold their wedding here at St. Patrick’s in Huntington, because, I believe, this likely was God’s preference from the beginning.
St. Patrick’s is fitting because Joseph Peter von Uffel was baptized here by Father James Richter, on May 3, 1992, and baptism, as you know, is the foundation of Christian marriage, when we enter into the Church’s spousal bond with Christ Jesus the eternal Bridegroom. If baptism, however, were the only criterion, it would have been just as fitting for this wedding to take place at St. Agnes Cathedral in Rockville Centre, where Msgr. Robert Mulligan baptized Victoria Rose Giardina on May 9, 1993.
St. Patrick’s is fitting also because JP and Victoria have often come for Mass here together on the Lord’s Day and the Eucharist is the consummation of the marriage bond between Christ and his the Church, when we become one flesh with Jesus through the awesome gift of Holy Communion. But if that were the main reason, we could have had the wedding in any of the various other Churches, where the two of them, as faithful Catholics, have similarly gone to Mass, depending upon their schedules.
The reason why St. Patrick’s is so fitting for their marriage is because of what happened here in 2013. It was soon after JP had rushed through the door for work at Joe’s Jeans in Soho and had caught sight of Victoria for the first time. They were both working part-time to make money during college and, even though JP said he disliked the work, one particularly beautiful co-worker made it tolerable. “Instead of dreading my workday,” JP told me, “I began to look forward to it, since it meant that I would get to spend more time with” Victoria. They began to enjoy each other’s company so much that their manager had to start separating them at the store. JP got the courage to ask Victoria if she’d like to spend some time together outside of work. Victoria accepted and they went out on a few dates. But then Victoria suggested that they cool off, since she didn’t feel it was right at the time, and they decided to remain friends.
JP’s response was to come here to St. Patrick’s. Looking back, he says it was “perhaps [one of the] most important” decisions of his life. Here, he said, “I pleaded with God that, if his will would allow for Victoria and me to be together, that he please bring it to fruition.” God heard his prayer. Victoria soon recognized, as she told me, that “distance makes the heart grow fonder!” They started back again, had their first official date on December 1, 2013, grew ever closer, and began that joint preparation for marriage that today reaches its culmination as God joins them for the grace-filled adventure of married life. Once they had stated dating again, JP had recognized that God had heard the prayer he fervently made here in this holy house of God. Today we come here with him, with Victoria, with the pastor of this parish, Msgr. Steven Camp, and with their families and friends, to thank God for having heard that prayer, to praise him for the vocation he gave each of them, and to implore him, who has allowed them to be together, to continue, as JP asked, to “bring to fruition” the good work he has begun in them.
Today, September 5, is an important day in the life of the Church. In God’s providence there really are no coincidences. It’s no accident, for example, that JP and Victoria were both born on February 2, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord Jesus, albeit a year apart, as this great mystery of the Lord, depicted among the stained glass windows in this Church, introduces them and the whole Christian people into the mystery of the obedience of the Holy Family and the joyful blessing of receiving children as gifts of the Lord and consecrating them to God in baptism.
It’s similarly no happenstance that their proposal occurred on June 29, 2019, not just because JP had spent months saving, shopping for a ring and then planning and coordinating all of the details, but because that is the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, the rock on whom Jesus built his Church and the teacher of the nations, whose preaching, letters, works, heroic deaths and heavenly intercession are so important to Catholic identity and whose writings on the sanctity of marriage in particular are so crucial for every couple that wants to live its spousal vocation and mission to the full.
September 5 is similarly significant. It is the feast of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, one of the greatest saints of modern times, who died and passed into eternity 24 years ago today in Calcutta. Your first anniversary, next year, JP and Victoria, will take place on the 25thanniversary of her birth into eternal life. On every anniversary you celebrate, as you come to Mass to thank God, the Church will be remembering her and praying to God through her intercession.
I had the awesome privilege to meet Mother Teresa on two occasions, to organize a major event at the United Nations on her after her 2016 canonization, and to have the great gift of serving her sisters, in Rome, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, throughout Central America, in the Bronx and in Harlem. Saint Teresa had a profound love for the Sacrament of Marriage and for married couples and since, by God’s providence, your anniversary and hers will forever be linked, I would like to share with you some of her simple wisdom in the hope that you may choose to take her as a special patron of the holy bond God is about to form in you today.
In 1992, a Catholic writer with whom I’ve collaborated for several years, Tom Hoopes, was planning to get married to April Beingessner. When they were putting together their invitation lists, they decided to add a few names. They invited President George and First Lady Barbara Bush. They invited Pope John Paul II. And they invited Mother Teresa. President and Mrs. Bush declined and their staff sent a routine card of congratulations. Saint John Paul II was likewise unable to make a papal trip for their occasion, but his assistants arranged for them to be sent a papal blessing. Saint Teresa, in contrast, sent them a long, typewriter-written and personally signed letter. The advice she gave them in preparation for their marriage, I believe she from heaven would similarly give to you.
Mother Teresa wrote, “Jesus has called you together to become one heart full of love in His Heart. Remain always so.” She reminded them that marriage happens not just through a random encounter at a premium denim jeans outlet, but is a vocation. Jesus forms a young man and a young woman and calls them to be together for life. But the vocation doesn’t stop there. Jesus similarly calls them to become, through the Sacrament of Marriage, “one heart full of love in His [own Sacred] Heart.” The love you have for each other, in others words, is not meant to be typical human romantic love sprinkled with a little bit of holy water. It’s supposed to lead both of you to become one heart together with the Lord, to let his love become the defining reality of your love, so that you might love each other as he has loved you first. “Remain always” in this love, Saint Teresa encourages, by immersing yourselves in the means by which we grow in divine love, by prayer, by the sacraments, and by Christian charity in the little and big things of every day.
She continued her July 18, 1992 letter to April and Tom by saying: “On your wedding day, you will receive many gifts, some very expensive ones also. But the most precious gift you will be receiving on that day is the gift of each other. So know each other as God’s special gift of love to you and love and cherish each other. Keep the joy of loving each other and share this joy.” She urges you always to see the other as a precious gift, a gift from the other, for sure, but also a “special gift of love” from God. If God loves you so much to give you each other, please know he will give you all you need in order to come to the fulfillment of married life, if only you receive those gifts like you have received the gift of each other. She encourages you to rejoice at this gift and contagiously share this joy, which is the fruit of divine and spousal love. Don’t hold it within. Radiate it. “A joyful heart,” she said elsewhere, “is the normal result of a heart burning with love.”
She continued her letter with an appeal for Tom and April to be generous in receiving children as a gift from God. “As the fullness and fruitfulness of marriage is found in children,” she declared, “welcome children into your wedlock and help them grow up to be the sunshine of God’s love in your family and in your neighborhood.” We live in an age in which children are often not seen as the extraordinary blessing they are, as we underestimate the awesome capacity human beings have to cooperate with God in bringing into existence someone who will live for all eternity and hopefully praise God forever together with them and all the saints. Many fear children and try to separate the act of making love from openness to life, trying by various means to exclude God from the very capacity God has given them to “increase and multiply.” Others take the lives of children already conceived in God’s image and likeness and attempt blasphemously to celebrate such destruction as if doing so were a fundamental human right. Many nations tie international development aid to population control policies, because they see babies in the developing world as a threat to their lifestyle or to the care of the planet. And we see many countries in demographic implosion because so many families are fearful and parsimonious in their cooperation with God’s plans.
Mother Teresa commented, “The problem with our world is that we draw the circle of family too small.” She said, “The child is the beauty of God present in the world, that greatest gift to a family,” but so many don’t see that beauty or receive that gift.That’s why she urged the Hoopes: “Welcome children into your wedlock and help them grow up to be the sunshine of God’s love in your family and in your neighborhood.” Many don’t receive children as the gifts they are. That’s why, in a few minutes, in your statements of intention, I will ask you, “Are you prepared to accept children lovingly from God and to bring them up according to the law of Christ and the Church?,” and you will reply, “I am.” Tom and April were asked that same question in 1992. They heeded Mother Teresa’s words and, despite the typical economic hardships most families need to endure, especially early in marriage, they are now the parents of nine children. I’d urge you, JP and Victoria, to be similarly open to receiving every gift the Lord desires to send you.
The final part of Saint Teresa’s letter was a call to prayer. She wrote,“From the first day of your life together as husband and wife, pray together. For the family that prays together stays together in love, peace and unity. Prayer gives a clean heart and a clean heart can see and serve God in one another. Let us pray. God bless you.” Just like Tobias and Sarah, in the first reading you chose, prayed on their wedding night in praise of God for the gift of marriage, prayed for each other, prayed for the grace to regard each other with reverence instead of lust, and prayed for the gift of a long and happy marriage, so Saint Teresa is urging you to pray. Everywhere she traveled, she urged married couples to pray in particular the Rosary together, promising that when couple pray together they will learn how to love each other as God has loved them, because, as she wrote to Tom and April, prayer allows us to see God and help us find and love him in each other.
God’s will for you, Victoria and JP, is not just to get married and have a family, but to grow to become a truly holy family, centered on God. Prayer is the means. It will help you, like prayer helped Tobias and Sarah, to grasp how you fit into God’s plans from the beginning, what we pondered not just in the first reading but in today’s epistle and Gospel as well, from Adam and Eve to Joseph Peter and Victoria Rose. It will help you to take each other with the purity God intends and the other deserves. It will make you receptive to the mercy God wants to give you so that you can share that forgiveness with each other. And it will help you to persevere in marriage truly happy, since God is the source of true and lasting joy.
Yesterday as I was preparing this homily, I sent Tom Hoopes an email saying that I was hoping to share its contents with you during your wedding on Mother Teresa’s feast day. He wrote back a few minutes later, saying he would be honored to have it shared, and adding, “Her advice has helped us and our friends for decades through the joys and difficulties of marriage.” It will similarly, I’m convinced, help you.
I’m convinced Mother Teresa is now praying from above to help you to become, as a married couple, “missionaries of charity,” true ambassadors of divine and human love. Every vocation has a mission and your mission as a married couple is to spread love, not the saccharine, cheap version featured in so many pop songs, sitcoms and movies, but the real deal, the type of love to which St. Paul calls you in today’s second reading when he tells you, JP, to love Victoria like Christ loves the Church, and handed himself over to sanctify her through his crucifixion. St. Paul asks you, Victoria, to love JP by the same standard, telling you to be “submissive” or “subordinate” to him, which doesn’t mean subservient, compliant, bossed around, or passively used. The phrase means, literally, “under the mission” or “under the orders” JP has received, if necessary, to die for you. It means to receive, inspire, and encourage his total self-giving. And it’s not a one-way street. St. Paul calls each of you at the beginning of the passage to be “subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ,” to be mutually submissive, because you know that Christ dwells in the other by means of the Sacrament.
For Mother Teresa, submission is essential for growth in true love. The spirit or charism of the Missionaries of Charity, she said, is “loving trust, total submission and cheerfulness” as lived by Jesus and Mary. It begins with a trust for the other that’s not dry but full of affection, which leads us willingly to give ourselves over to the other in love, and to do so full of joy. Mutual subordination, in the complementary vocations of Christian marriage, is the foundation, not the contradiction, of spousal love. “A life not lived for others,” she said, “is not [really] a life.” Just as Jesus sent out his first apostles and disciples two-by-two, so he sends married couples out, with hands and souls joined, as missionaries of his divine charity, who show by the way they lay down their lives for each other how Christ has done so for us and how we’re called to do so for him and each other.
I rejoice that you have both already gotten started on this mission of charity. You told me, Victoria, about the many ways JP has shown the sincerity of his love for you. “He is so kind and caring not just to me but to my family as well which is so important to me,” you said. “I know he would do anything and everything for me. He appreciates me so much! He makes me feel special all the time! He always makes me feel so loved and makes me feel like I’m the only one for him. He is always such a positive person. He has shown me to always look at the brighter side of life!” Never to be outdone in words, you, JP, told me about the many ways the woman to whom God will join you in one flesh in just a few minutes shows her love for you: “I love how good natured she is. She works incredibly hard, makes time for her family, and cares deeply about her friends. She is wholesome. She is incredibly playful and fun and I love spending time with her. She’s inspired me on a more suitable career path and helped me achieve a major fitness goal. My main motivation now comes down to wanting to ‘be better’ for her always.”
This standard of Christian love to which you’re aspiring isn’t easy, but Mother Teresa commented, “If you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” True love is shown first in the small and ordinary things of each day. “We cannot do great things on this earth,” she said, “only small things with great love.” She stated that the greatest disease in the West today is “being unwanted, unloved and uncared for.” There is a “poverty of loneliness, … a hunger for love,” and people are “dying for a little love.” She urged married couples and the family to respond to God’s call and bring his love to the unloved parts and people of the world. That mission of love, she said, “begins by taking care of the closest ones, those at home,” adding, “It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. Bring love into your home, for this is where our love for each other must start.” She encouraged us to greeteach other with smiles, even when smiling is difficult, “for the smile is the beginning of love.” Then she added, “Spread love everywhere you go. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next-door neighbor.” From the Christian home and its loving welcome, people will emerge to be able to share with others the love they have received, and be capable, one act of love at a time, to create a civilization of life and love. That’s what this one Albanian girl saying yes to her vocation was able to do throughout the world. That’s what God can do through anyone, and any couple, that says a similar yes.
A final thought about heaven. You’re being married and will mark your anniversary each year on the day God chose to come to take her with him to heaven, the day on which her love for God was fulfilled, when God helped her to see that every time she cared for someone who was hungry, thirst, naked, a stranger, sick or imprisoned, she was caring for him. She saw her mission of charity ultimately as trying to get as many people as possible onto the train of life leading toward the station of the heavenly Jerusalem. Your anniversary each year will be an opportunity to recommit yourselves ever more to the ultimate purpose of the Sacrament of Matrimony and every sacrament: heaven, to enter into God’s life and have him enter more deeply into yours so that living in mutual embrace here you will pass into eternity, for the celebration of the eternal nuptial feast.
The greatest preparation to get on and stay aboard that holy train is the celebration of the Mass, which was the fulcrum of each day of her adult life, where she would receive within her the full outpouring of Christ’s love in his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, and be strengthened on her Mission to take that divine charity toward others. I’d urge you both in her name to come here to Mass, together, with similar faith ,so that God from within can sanctity you so that you may be the means by which he sanctifies the other, your family, your friends and your neighbors. This is where you’ll learn how to make your whole marriage, like she made her religious life, a commentary on the words of consecration, “This is my body, … This is my Blood,” “This is all I am and have,” “given out of love for you.”
In this Church where JP eight years ago made his earnest prayer for Victoria and God so lavishly answered it, with gratitude to God, through the intercession of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, we make our own for them her words in her prayer for the family:
“Heavenly Father, you have given us the model of life in the Holy Family of Nazareth. Help [JP and Victoria], O Loving Father, to make [their] family another Nazareth where love, peace and joy reign. May it be deeply contemplative, intensely Eucharistic, revived with joy. Help [them] to stay together in joy and sorrow in family prayer. Teach [them] to see Jesus in the members of [their family], especially in their distressing disguise. May the Eucharistic heart of Jesus make [their] hearts humble like His and help [them] to carry out [their] family duties in a holy way. May [they] love one another as God loves each one of [them], more and more each day, and forgive each other’s faults as you forgive our sins. Help [them], O Loving Father, to take whatever you give and give whatever you take with a big smile. Immaculate Heart of Mary, Cause of our Joy, pray for [them]. St. Joseph, pray for [them]. Holy Guardian Angels, be always with [them], guide and protect [them]. Amen.”
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A Reading from the Book of Tobit
When the girl’s parents left the bedroom and closed the door behind them, Tobiah arose from bed and said to his wife, “My love, get up. Let us pray and beg our Lord to have mercy on us and to grant us deliverance.” She got up, and they started to pray and beg that deliverance might be theirs. He began with these words: “Blessed are you, O God of our fathers; praised be your name forever and ever. Let the heavens and all your creation praise you forever. You made Adam and you gave him his wife Eve to be his help and support; and from these two the human race descended. You said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; let us make him a partner like himself.’ Now, Lord, you know that I take this wife of mine not because of lust, but for a noble purpose. Call down your mercy on me and on her, and allow us to live together to a happy old age.” They said together, “Amen, amen,”
Gradual — “Children too are a gift from the LORD, the fruit of the womb, a reward.”
A Reading from the Letter to the Ephesians
Brothers and Sisters, Live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma. Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body. As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. So [also] husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “For this reason a man shall leave [his] father and [his] mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church. In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.
A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to Matthew
Some Pharisees approached Jesus, and tested him, saying, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?” He said in reply, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.”
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