Recognizing and Responding to the Time of our Visitation, 33rd Thursday (I), November 18, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Leonine Forum NYC Chapter
IESE Business School, New York
Thursday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial Mass of St. Rose Philippine Duchesne
November 18, 2021
1 Mc 2:15-29, Ps 50, Lk 19:41-44

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel we see Jesus weeping. It’s important for us as Christians to ponder these tears, because we’re not accustomed to see Jesus crying. As far as the evangelists record, he didn’t cry during the scourging. He didn’t cry carrying the Cross. He didn’t even cry during his crucifixion. And yet today he wept. What can we learn?
• As he drew near Jerusalem, Jesus saw the city and wept over it. There’s a Church on the Mount of Olives overlooking the city called Dominus Flevit, “The Lord wept,” in which Christians ponder the tears of the Lord. When I was there a few years ago with a big pilgrimage group there were torrential downpours outside, a meteorological event that allowed us to ponder the immensity of the Lord’s weeping. St. Luke tells us why Jesus was weeping. Jesus said, “If this day you only knew what makes for peace, but now it is hidden from your eyes. For the days are coming upon you when your enemies will raise a palisade against you; they will encircle you and hem you in on all sides. They will smash you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another within you because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.” He was weeping because the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Holy City, didn’t know what makes for peace and because the city and its inhabitants would be destroyed — and all of this was happening because they didn’t recognize the time of their “visitation.” In religious communities, Dioceses and other ecclesiastical institutions in trouble, there is often a “visitation.” Anybody can pay a “visit,” but a visitation is something much longer. It’s a time of self-study. It’s a time of evaluation. It’s a time when the Visitator helps the whole community to take a good look at itself and where it’s going. It’s a time to notice and correct problems. God did not just “visit” but “visitated”  his people in the person of Jesus. He was the Prince of Peace who had come to establish the definitive peace treaty between God and man, to help people see where they were in terms of peace with God and with each other and change to how they ought to be, but the inhabitants of Jerusalem, representing the vast majority of Jews, hadn’t embraced Jesus and the path to divine peace he had come, as he said during the Last Supper, to leave us and give us. Had they embraced the life he was announcing, had they grasped the type of kingdom he was inaugurating, the political tensions that had led to Rome’s destroying Jerusalem in 70 AD, Jesus was prophesying by implication, likely wouldn’t have come about. And Jesus was weeping over all of these realities.
• It’s important for us to grasp that Jesus was not weeping over ancient Rome, or Athens, or Sparta. He wasn’t weeping over modern day Las Vegas, or San Francisco, or Amsterdam. He wasn’t weeping over present day Paris or New York. He was weeping over Jerusalem, where the vast majority of people believed themselves to be religious, to be God-fearing, to be faithful. Jesus was weeping because they hadn’t recognized the time when God had come to visit them and shortly they would run him out of the holy city carrying a Cross. We need to ask ourselves whether Jesus would be weeping over Manhattan with all its Catholics, over the United States, over the world. Do we recognize the time of our visitation? It’s easy for us to point to many who are living lives clearly contrary to the ways of God who don’t recognize the continuation of Jesus’ incarnation in the sacraments and in the Church. But what about those of us who, like the ancient Jews in Jerusalem, think ourselves religious? Do we grasp what makes for peace and how the Lord has come to visit us? We prayed in the Alleluia verse before the Gospel, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts,” and the reality is that many times the inner ears of our heart are closed to God’s voice calling us to conversion and holiness.
• We need to enter into Jesus’ healing, salvific tears in two ways. We need to grasp that Jesus weeps copiously for us when we don’t really let him into our lives to bring us the fullness of peace he wishes to give us. But then we also need to enter into his tears and weep with him for all those who similarly do not open up their hearts to him, who refuse or reject his peace, his presence, his grace, his sacraments, his word, his brothers or sisters. Jesus said in the second beatitude, “Blessed are those who mourn.” The path to heaven is a path of tears. This world is a journey “mourning and weeping through this valley of tears.” We Christians don’t ponder enough Jesus’ tears and don’t weep enough with him, not just for the hardened sinners far from the Lord, but also for those who believe themselves to be close to him but who out of stubbornness don’t allow Jesus to change them for the better because they don’t want to be disturbed. Today is a day in which we first confront the possibility that Jesus has been weeping for us because we yet haven’t fully responded to his call to become saints, because we have not yet really meant the words we’ve prayed thousands of times, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And we weep because so many others haven’t prayed them at all or like us fully willed God’s kingdom and will to be done over theirs.
• We see these lessons alluded to in today’s powerful first reading. Mattathias saw the way so many of his fellow Jews had capitulated out of human respect to their Greek occupiers and had even apostatized, sacrificing to the pagan gods. They didn’t grasp that God “visitates” each day. Mattathias’ response, having been “filled with zeal,” was not the approach that Jesus, likewise filled with zeal, would take later. Mattathias would slay his fellow Jew and the Greek messenger, whereas Jesus would weep for them, forgive them, and die for them. But Mattathias got what Jesus was hoping all the Jews would get, that there was a need to recognize that God was perpetually visiting them and they were called to conversion and holiness. And Jesus would want us to use Mattathias’ zeal to slay within ourselves is not worthy of the Lord and then to go out to help others to do the same.
• Someone who recognized the time of her visitation, responded well, and sought to bring others to conversion and holiness with regard to Jesus’ ongoing incarnation, was St. Rose Philippine Duchesne. She was born to a wealthy family in France; her father was a banker and businessman and her mother part of a family that eventually produced a French president. After having been educated by the Visitation nuns, she wanted to join them, but her father wanted her to enter into a fitting marriage, and so she needed to run away. The French Revolution closed her convent and after trying to reestablish it, she joined St. Madeleine Sophie Barat in the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and eventually accepted a mission to come to the United States. At the age of 49, with five other sisters, she embarked on a grueling 20-week journey across the Atlantic and up the Mississippi River. Rose was sick the entire voyage and twice was near death, but she soldiered on until they arrived in St. Louis. The bishop established them in St. Charles and gave them a one-room log cabin, which they used to found a school for poor children, the first free school west of the Mississippi. Thus began 34 years of missionary toil in brutal conditions. The sisters needed to battle cold, hunger, sickness and deprivation, not to mention opposition to their French teaching methods, ingratitude and even calumny. “Poverty and Christian heroism are here,” she wrote succinctly back to the motherhouse, “and trials are the riches in this land.” About the calumny, she joked, “They say everything about us, except that we poison the children.” All of these crosses, however, served merely to prove and magnify her Christian virtue, and to spur her to share with children and fellow sisters the sweetness of a life in conformity with God’s word. Vocations from among her students started to come in large numbers and she was able to establish new houses, schools and orphanages in Florissant, Grand Côteau, New Orleans, St. Louis and St. Michael. As hard as she was working among the settlers in the frontier, she longed to bring the Gospel to the Indians, so that they would taste its sweetness as well. She got her wish when she was 72. By this point, she had become ill enough that she had asked to step down as superior. When a request came in from the famous Jesuit missionary Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet to help establish a school for the Patawatomi in Sugar Creek, Kansas, she volunteered to go. Her fellow sisters wanted to prevent her from the difficult work in her frail condition, but not only did she insist on going but so did Fr. De Smet. “She must come,” the black-robed apostle demanded. “She may not be able to do much work, but she will assure success to the mission by praying for us. Her very presence will draw down all manner of heavenly favors on the work.” That’s precisely what she did and what happened. It had been hard enough for her to learn English upon coming to America at about the age of 50. It was near impossible for her to learn the Indian dialect, but she did the best she could to teach the young Indian girls about Jesus. What she couldn’t convey in words, she conveyed in action. She spent most of her days and nights on her knees in prayer before Jesus in the Eucharist, which taught the Indians more about the real presence of Christ and about how to respond to his visitation than hundreds of catechism classes. Once, young squaws placed small pieces of paper on the back of her habit to see if she’d move during the night and go to bed. They came back in the morning and the pieces of paper were exactly where they had placed them. So moved were they by her example that they gave her a precise nickname: Quah-hak-ka-num-ad, “the woman who always prays.” Her prayers led to many conversions. Each of us, in our own circumstances, is called to be a “Quah-hak-ka-num-ad,” too.
• Tonight Jesus comes to us and he doesn’t want to weep but we pray rejoice! When we think of the word Visitation, named after the famous Biblical scene, we often think about Mary’s visiting her cousin Elizabeth, but the deepest meaning of that Visitation was that God was visiting the house of Zechariah in Ein Karim within Mary’s womb. Today the same God comes and visits not just this chapel, but each one of us as we prepare to receive him. Let us ask him for the grace, like St. Rose Philippine, to recognize the time of our visitation, to grasp what leads to peace, and to structure our life and the world around us in the peace of Christ’s kingdom.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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