Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Paul Roman Catholic Church, Clifton, New Jersey
Nuptial Mass for Logan Amster and Jennifer Katherine Monsalve
October 7, 2023
Gen 2:18-24, Lk 1:46-55, Eph 5:2.21-33, Jn 15:9-17
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, preached partially in Spanish, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
A week after Jennifer and Logan got engaged, they asked to get together with me so that we could speak about the process and length of marriage preparation and about a wedding date. They had a very strong hope that they would be able to get married on October 7, the annual feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. At first I thought it was just a sign of their devotion to Mary and the fact that this year, October 7 fell on a Saturday in autumn. But over the course of marriage preparation, I discovered that it had much greater meaning. They essentially first got to know each other praying the Rosary at the outdoor Marian Grotto at the University of Mary in North Dakota in mid-2020, while both of them were on an intense thirty-day Ignatian retreat, two of 24 retreatants supported by six spiritual directors. Jennifer would head to the Grotto to pray the Rosary before she would go to lunch; Logan would head there to pray the Rosary right after lunch. But they were generally there at the same time, the only time of day their schedules would overlap, praying to Our Lady for their future, so that they might discern what God was asking of them in life and receive through our Lady’s prayers the grace, like her, to say yes to whatever God might ask. Jennifer told me that six months before she had met Logan, she had asked her grandmother to pray with her “por un San José de carne y hueso que reza y baila,” for a St. Joseph of flesh and bones who would know how to pray and to dance. Little did she know as she was praying to God in the small Marian enclosure that that prayerful dancer in the image of St. Joseph was right beside her. Little did Logan know as he was asking for light about what God wanted of him for his life that the woman praying in the same Warford Grotto would become part of God’s answer to his petitions.
About a year later, after Logan discerned that he was not being called to serve the Lord as a priest, he reached out to Jennifer to see if she might want to go out on a date. That first date led to several others and, over time, to the realization that God was calling them together to the Sacrament of Matrimony. And as Logan began to plot when and where to ask Jennifer to marry him, he chose what he thought would be a most fitting spot. He invited Jennifer to go with him to pray a Eucharistic Holy Hour not just at any Church but at the Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary in Summit (New Jersey), where for 104 years the Dominican nuns have prayed a perpetual Rosary for the needs and intentions of the world. After time together adoring the Lord in the beautiful adoration chapel, Logan led Jennifer to the Statue of Our Lady of Fatima on the grounds. In Fatima, Our Lady had taught the three shepherd children how to pray the Rosary correctly and urged them to do so for peace in the world and the conversion of sinners. In her final apparition to them in 1917, the Mother of God referred to herself as “the Lady of the Rosary” and stated, “I desire … that people continue to recite the Rosary every day.” Before that statue of Our Lady of Fatima, on the grounds of the Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary, Logan dropped to a knee and asked Jennifer to marry him — and Jennifer, after an explosion of joyful tears, composed herself enough to say, “Of course, yes!”
And so it is most fitting that, in accordance with their desire, that they are getting married on the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. This year is a particularly special occasion, for we are marking the 450th anniversary of its first celebration. In 1571, Pope St. Pius V had asked Christians to pray the Rosary for the outnumbered Christian fleet against the invading Turks and it was on October 7 that, thanks to Mary’s intercession, the Christian navy routed their Muslim counterparts in the Battle of Lepanto. In gratitude, St. Pius V decreed that on the first anniversary of the triumph, the Church would celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Victory. But he died five months before that celebration would take place. His successor, Pope Gregory XIII, after celebrating it, decided to change the name of the feast to Our Lady of the Rosary, to promote the means by which Our Lady seeks to lead us to victory just over invading navies but against the evil one and all his infernal troops. The first celebration was on October 7, 1573, four and a half centuries ago today. And so on this important day in Church history, we come together to pray for Logan and Jennifer through the intercession of the one before whom they prayed in North Dakota, whose intercession they sought in Summit, who encouraged us all in Fatima, asking her to be with them continuously as they seek to build their marriage on the rock solid foundation of the Christian faith all the days that they shall live.
Their devotion to Our Lady and to the Holy Rosary is a key part of the pre-history of their marriage and, we pray, will remain an important part of their married life. Pope St. John Paul II used to emphasize the importance of the Rosary to help make the family strong. He wrote in a beautiful 2002 exhortation, “The Rosary is … and always has been, a prayer of and for the family. At one time this prayer was particularly dear to Christian families, and it certainly brought them closer together. It is important not to lose this precious inheritance. We need to return to the practice of family prayer and prayer for families, continuing to use the Rosary. … The family that prays together stays together. The Holy Rosary, by age-old tradition, has shown itself particularly effective as a prayer that brings the family together. Individual family members, in turning their eyes towards Jesus, also regain the ability to look one another in the eye, to communicate, to show solidarity, to forgive one another and to see their covenant of love renewed in the Spirit of God. Many of the problems facing contemporary families, especially in economically developed societies, result from their increasing difficulty in communicating. Families seldom manage to come together, and the rare occasions when they do are often taken up with watching television. To return to the recitation of the family Rosary means filling daily life with very different images, images of the mystery of salvation: the image of the Redeemer, the image of his most Blessed Mother. The family that recites the Rosary together reproduces something of the atmosphere of the household of Nazareth: its members place Jesus at the center, they share his joys and sorrows, they place their needs and their plans in his hands, they draw from him the hope and the strength to go on.”
Logan and Jennifer, we’re all praying not just that your family will pray together and stay together, but that your home will be just as focused on Jesus as the home of the Holy Family in Nazareth was. The Rosary will help you to make Jesus the center of your married life. As you know, in many Latino marriages, there is a beautiful rite after the exchange of vows and rings, called the “Lazo,” which is basically a huge double set of Rosary beads linked together and put over the shoulders of the couple to symbolize their indissoluble union. We will not have that formal rite today, but in the Sacrament of Marriage, the Mother of God, together with the Blessed Fruit of her womb, place an invisible Lazo over every couple, praying that they will obtain what the mysteries of the Rosary contain, and advance together with unbreakable love in the school of holiness. That’s why, later today, you will process to the altar of Our Lady, beseeching her intercession that you will keep your marital union faithful, fruitful, and indissoluble precisely by growing in your bond of prayer, conscious that the family that prays together stays together, and hoping that through the Rosary, Mary will help keep you united all the way until the eternal nuptial banquet. In his famous painting of the Last Judgment in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo painted the Rosary as a lifeline lifting souls all the way to heaven. May the Rosary always be such a lifeline for you, lifting you, we pray, as well as your family and all of us your friends with you up to the place where Mary, after our earthly exile, seeks to show us Jesus. The Rosary is a chain that will bind you in love to each other and, through Mary, to Christ.
One of the three Fatima children, the famous Sr. Lucia, wrote in the early 1980s to Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, one of my former professors in Rome who was at the time founding the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family. Caffarra was just asking for prayers, but Sr. Lucia wrote back with a powerful and ever urgent message. She stated, “The final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will about marriage and the family,” and declared that therefore “whoever works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought against and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue.” She told him, nevertheless, “Be not afraid,” because “Our Lady has already crushed his head.” We remember that at the beginning of time, the evil one attacked the family of Eve and Adam, got them to distrust God and to sin against him by disobeying his command. In God’s plan of redemption, Mary, as the New Eve, seeks to help the family trust in God, love him, and obey his commands. Just as sin entered the world through the family, so, by Mary’s yes, Jesus, the Redeemer of the human race, entered the world through the family, to restore the family back to the image of the loving communion of persons who is God. Mary wants to help the family you are forming today, Logan and Jennifer, to share in her Son’s victory over Satan, to strive for the sanctity of your marriage and family, and to become protagonists in what she calls the decisive issue of every age.
This plan is revealed over the course of salvation history, which is developed in the readings you chose for your Nuptial Mass. In the Book of Genesis, we see that in the beginning, when God created Adam, Adam had God all to himself in the garden. All of creation had been made for him to govern. He was perfectly in right relationship with God. Even though he seemed to have everything one could ask for, he wasn’t happy. And after God had said in the first six phases of creation, “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” and with the creation of the human person, “It was very good,” God finally thundered, “It is not good…for man to be alone,” and so created Eve, a fitting partner, symbolically out of his side, to show that they stand side-by-side, equal, before him. When Adam saw her, he finally experienced joy, exclaiming, “This is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!,” a Hebrew idiom saying that they shared strengths and weaknesses and were to be one flesh. As the text ends, we’re told that this is the reason why a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh in love. The upshot of the Creation account in the Book of Genesis is that God, who is love, has created the human person in his image and likeness, in love and for love. And because no one can love in a vacuum, God could not be solitary, because there needed to be a Lover and a Beloved, and in God the love between them was so strong as to take on personality. For that reason, in creating the human person, God created not just a “him, male and female” but a “them,” a communion between man and woman whose love for each other could be so strong as to “make love,” to generate new life, as a fruit of their loving communion of persons. From the first marriage of Adam and Eve, to your marriage, Logan and Jennifer, marriage was created by God to be a sacrament of love, to help you to grow to be more and more like God and at the same time more fully human. Today you will not only receive a Sacrament but become a Sacrament, a visible sign, as St. John Paul II used to say, pointing to the invisible reality of the Trinitarian loving communion of persons, a living reminder of the fruitful, faithful, indissoluble love of God and an icon of Christ’s love for his bride the Church.
Even after sin attacked that primordial plan of love, God came into the world to redeem it. That’s what we ponder in today’s Gospel. Jesus says incredible words: “As the Father loves me, so I also love you.” Jesus loves each of us as perfectly as the Father loves him, with the infinite intensity with which the Persons of the Blessed Trinity love each other. But then Jesus gives two commands. The first is, “Remain in my love.” We don’t have to earn his love. It’s a given. It precedes our actions. God has loved us from even before the foundation of the world. Our task is to not to run away from that love, not to protest we’re unworthy of it, but to abide in it. To remain is an action verb. It’s the result of a choice. To remain in this sense does not mean just to stay where we are or do nothing; rather it’s to choose to open ourselves up to God’s love, in our prayer, in our relationships, in our work, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, in poverty and prosperity, all our days. Jesus tells us that to remain in his love we need to keep his commandments because his commandments train us to remain in, receive and reciprocate his love. Then he gives the second command. “Love one another as I have loved you.” To remain in Christ’s love, to keep his commandments, is to let Christ’s love overflow in us through the way we treat each other. And that love is meant to last even until death. Jesus reminds you, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And the standard of marital love that he makes possible is to give of your life fully to each other in this way, willingly sacrificing yourself for the other’s good for as long as you both shall live.
This is what the epistle you chose makes explicit. Echoing Jesus’ words from the Last Supper, St. Paul tells you, “Live in love, as Christ has loved us and handed himself over for us.” He calls you, Logan, to love Jennifer like Christ loves his Bride the Church and handed himself over to sanctify her through his passion, crucifixion and resurrection. Any husband worthy of the name will be similarly willing to die to protect his wife and children — and you’re called to that standard of Christ-like spousal love not just at a supreme moment but in day-to-day life. St. Paul encourages you, Jennifer, to love Logan by the same metric, telling you to be “submissive” or “subordinate” to him, which doesn’t mean subservient, compliant, bossed around, or passively used. The phrase means, literally, to be “under the mission” or “under the orders” Logan has received, if necessary, to lay down his life for you. It means to receive, inspire, and encourage his total self-giving, to reverence him, to receive and reciprocate him total self-giving, to be willing to die for him, just as so many saints and martyrs, female and male, have done throughout the centuries for Christ. That’s ultimately the redeeming love God wants to see be brought to completion in you through married life. In the face of many who doubt that loving one other by Christ’s standards is possible, you are called in your marriage to become the visible, efficacious, sacramental sign of Jesus’ love in the world.
And the fruit of this type of life is meant to be joy. Jesus tells you in the Gospel, “I have told you this, so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” Happiness comes not through self-affirmation but through self-giving love, through mutual sacrifices made and received. And he wants you to have this joy, the joy about which we sang in Mary’s Magnificat, the joy the world can’t give or rob, the joy that radiated within the Holy Family even amidst the many human hardships they had to endure.
We rejoice that you are already seeking to love by Christ’s lofty redeeming standards of love and are experiencing together the holy fruit of joy that flows from it.
Logan, you told me about Jennifer, that she “has shown to me repeatedly that she loves me unconditionally. Outside of my family, I had never really experienced that in another person. … She continuously thinks of ways, big and small, that she can lift me up, enrich my life and help me to grow. From her example of showing endless outpourings of love not only for me but for her friends and family, I have learned a lot about what it means to love others. I used to think of love as ‘showing up when called upon.’ Jennifer helped me to realize that love really means to think about others [ahead of time], to spend time and energy modeling the ultimate good for another person, what will lift their spirits, enrich their life, instill hope and faith, and then to take steps to make those things a reality. She is the most generous person I know, and simply trying to keep up with her has been transformative.” You likewise told me, without sentimentality, that Jennifer’s love infuses so many of her other virtues. You said that she “has so many qualities that are not only worthy of love but real admiration. She is a woman of aspirational faith who teaches me to strive constantly to express my love and faith in God more fully. She is completely honest, intelligent, personally and physically beautiful, funny, charitable, empathetic, curious, bold and unashamed of who she is or her faith in God.” In short you have found in her someone who remains in Christ’s love, who allows that love to overflow, and has brought into your life more deeply than anyone the joy that is the fruit of Christ-like loving.
Jennifer, even though Logan obviously struggled to say something good about you, you couldn’t restrain yourself from thanking God for the way Logan has strived to love you with the love that Christ has for the Church. You told me during marriage preparation, “In my relationship with Logan, I feel completely loved and spoiled, while at the same time being challenged to be a better person. This relationship challenges me to grow into the woman God created me to be. With Logan I can dream and desire to live a marriage as God intended. He is the answer to so many prayers and novenas through the intercession of Mary and St. Joseph. I’m in awe of the way he lives out his trust in the Lord. Logan goes ‘all in’ wherever the Lord calls him. He lays down his life for me every day in small and big ways. He moved to New York City to pursue our relationship. He shows he wants to care for me and is willing to sacrifice for it. He always protects our time to check in and pray daily, regardless of how busy his schedule is. He showers me with compliments every single day. He approaches our conversations with humility. He leads us in living chastely and works on being virtuous daily for our relationship. He is patient with me. He invests in my loved ones and activities out of love for me. He makes it clear to me every day that he chooses me over and over again. I am a better woman today than I was when I started dating him. When I’m around him, I feel more like a woman. His masculinity draws out my femininity in a way I had never experienced before. Logan’s own relationship with Christ inspires me to grow in deeper trust of God’s plan for my life.”
The love that you have for each other, Jennifer and Logan, Christ wants to perfect. At the wedding feast of Cana, Jesus worked his first public miracle, transforming 180 gallons of water — the equivalent of 912 750-millileter bottles — into precious wine, and elevated, we can say, the good and natural reality of marriage in the beginning with Adam and Eve up to the dignity of a sacrament, a sign and means of intimate communion with God himself. By the Sacrament he is going to work in and through you in just a few minutes, he seeks to raise the love you already have for each other into something sacramental, a holy image in the midst of the world of his ardent divine love. And he seeks to do so through what the saints and popes throughout the centuries have called the “Sacrament of Love,” which is not Matrimony, but the Eucharist. At every Nuptial Mass I’m privileged to celebrate, I always conclude by saying how extraordinarily fitting it is that Catholics marry in the context of a Mass, because the Mass is not just the source and summit of the Christian life but the root and center of the Sacrament of Marriage. The early Christians used to illustrate the reality between the Sacrament of Matrimony and the Sacrament of the Eucharist in their architecture, covering the altars — just like the high altar in this beautiful church of St. Paul — with a canopy just like ancient beds were covered, to communicate that the altar is the marriage bed of the union between Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Church. Catholics believe that it’s here on this altar that we, the Bride of Christ, in the supreme act of love, receive within ourselves, the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus, the divine Bridegroom, becoming one-flesh with him and being made capable of bearing fruit with him in acts of love. The Mass is the means by which Christ the Bridegroom will regularly renew you, Logan and Jennifer, in the indissoluble one flesh union he will form in you today. The Mass is the way by which you will receive within Christ’s love for you, remain in that love and become more capable of loving each other as he has loved you first. The Mass is where you will be strengthened to lay down your lives for each other and to make of your marriage a commentary on the words of consecration, “This is my body, given for you.” The Mass is where Christ will seek to bind you together each day more tightly in an indissoluble lazo of love and enable you to experience the fruits of his victory in what Sr. Lucia called the “decisive issue of our day.”
Today around this marriage bed of Christ’s union with the Church and with you, Fathers Restrepo, Jaramillo, Leos, Romero, Torres, and Franks, your parents and family — many of whom have traveled great distances to be here — your extraordinary friends, as well as all the angels and saints, join me in praying that the Lord who has begun his good work in you and brought you here to this altar will nourish your sacred vocation and bring it to perfection. We ask the Lord, through his Mother, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, on this most special day, never to stop blessing you with his holy, spousal love and, through the way that you joyfully share that love with each other to overflowing, never to stop blessing us all.
The readings for the Mass were:
A Reading from the Book of Genesis
The Lord God said: “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a suitable partner for him.” So the Lord God formed out of the ground various wild animals and various birds of the air, and he brought them to the man to see what he would call them; whatever the man called each of them would be its name. The man gave names to all the cattle, all the birds of the air, and all the wild animals; but none proved to be the suitable partner for the man. So the Lord God cast a deep sleep on the man, and while he was asleep, he took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. The Lord God then built up into a woman the rib that he had taken from the man. When he brought her to the man, the man said: “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; This one shall be called ‘woman,’ for out of ‘her man’ this one has been taken.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one body.
“The Almighty Has Done Great Things For Me and Holy Is His Name”
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior. For he has looked upon his handmaid’s lowliness; behold, from now on will all ages call me blessed. The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him. He has shown might with his arm, dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart. He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped Israel his servant, remembering his mercy, according to his promise to our fathers, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.
A Reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians
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 John
Jesus said, “As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. This is my commandment: love one another as I love you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father. It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you. This I command you: love one another.”
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