The Cornerstone of the Kingdom that Will Never Be Destroyed, 34th Tuesday (I), November 26, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 34th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Blessed James Alberione
November 26, 2019
Dan 2:31-45, Dan 3:47-61, Lk 21:5-11

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In this week in which we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King, we have a chance to think about the distinct nature of his kingdom and how to enter his kingdom. We must allow Christ our King to destroy false allegiances to earthly notions and learn from him how to become a kingdom of priests offering sacrifices to God the Father. Today’s readings help us to do just that, examining the foundations and goals of our life by inserting us more consciously within world and salvation history.
• In the first reading, we have the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, that none of his magicians, sorcerers, or others could interpret. Nebuchadnezzar didn’t reveal what he had seen. God had nevertheless revealed the dream to Daniel as well as its interpretation and so Daniel asked to be introduced into the king’s presence to interpret properly the dream. The king saw a large and bright statue with a head of pure gold, the torso silver, the belly and thighs bronze, the legs iron and the feet partly iron and partly clay. At the end of the dream the king saw a stone that was thrown from a mountain without a hand that rendered the entire statue to dust. Daniel said that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, was the gold head. He would be surpassed by the Persians (the silver torso), who themselves would be defeated by the Greeks (bronze belly and thighs). The Romans (iron legs) would come next, as strong as iron, but eventually their kingdom would have some weaknesses (feet half of clay). The stone that would come from above to pulverize the Romans would be the “stone rejected by the builders,” Christ himself, the Cornerstone. That’s what we celebrate during this week of Christ the King. Christ didn’t establish an earthly kingdom — his kingdom is not of this world — but the kingdom he did establish is the everlasting one that will know no end. But we know that there are three different spiritual interpretations of Sacred Scripture: the Christological (how it points to Jesus, or typological), moral (how it relates to us and our behavior) and anagogical (how it relates to the last things). The moral application would for us to recognize that if we have feet of clay, no matter how strong we are in other parts of our life, everything can come down. We need to look to our foundation. More on this soon.
• In the Gospel, we also see predicted destruction. Jesus describes how the temple itself would be destroyed such that “there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.” That’s because for many Jews the Temple had become an idol. Rather than a place of true encounter with God, they, as we saw at the end of last week, had perverted it to a den of thieves. They were not willing to grasp that that Temple was provisional until Christ the true Temple, the Messiah, came. Their foundation was built on the temple rather than on the God worshipped in the Temple. We can similarly have our own religious idols that rather than bringing us to God take us away. There are Catholics who if their Church is closed, sadly stop practicing the faith, as if the Church building, rather than God himself who dwells within the Church, is really the most important thing of all. Others make the liturgy an idol, treating the most minute change of a rubric as if it’s as bad as cold-blooded murder and exalting the sign over the signified to such a degree that there are some Catholics who refuse to accept, for example, the new order of the Mass 50 years this Saturday after its going into force. There are others who hold on to an idol image of Jesus — either as a warm indulgent teddy bear on the one hand or a fiery vengeance taking condemner on the other — that cannot be changed or even nuanced by God himself in prayer or through the Church. Jesus wants to smash all our idols so that he can help us build our entire lives on a firm foundation.
• And what is that foundation? We see it in St. Matthew’s parallel version of today’s Gospel. After he describes what will happen at the end of time he says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” He wants us to build our lives on his word as the foundation of rock — what he describes at the end of the Sermon on the Mount — that will keep us secure even when the earthquakes, wars, insurrections, famines and plagues happen. He wants us to build ourselves on the stone rejected by the builders who has become the cornerstone.
• The saints, of course, are those who are exemplary for us in doing so. Today we celebrate the feast of someone who sought to build his whole life on Jesus as Cornerstone and help everyone else to build solidly on the rock of God’s word. It’s Blessed James Alberione. He’s the founder (or co-founder) of ten different religious congregations, institutes and movements of lay cooperators, all geared toward promoting the Catholic faith through various forms of modern media, through the liturgy, through catechetical instruction: the Society of St. Paul, the Daughters of St. Paul, the Pious Disciples of the Divine Master, the Sisters of Jesus the Good Shepherd, the Sisters of Mary Queen of Apostles, The Institute of St. Gabriel the Archangel, The Institute of Mary of the Annunciation, The Institute of Jesus the Priest, The Institute of the Holy Family and the Association of Pauline Cooperators. St. John Paul II said of him at his beatification, “Blessed James Alberione felt the need to make Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth and the Life, known ‘to all people of our time with the means of our time,’  as he liked to say.” He sought to make him known as the way to follow, the truth to believe and the life to live. “Blessed James was inspired by the Apostle Paul, whom he described as a ‘theologian and architect of the Church,’ remaining ever docile and faithful to the Magisterium of the Successor of Peter, a ‘beacon’ of truth in a world that is so often devoid of sound spiritual references. ‘May there be a group of saints to use these means,’  this apostle of the new times was in the habit of repeating. What a formidable heritage he left his religious family! May his spiritual sons and daughters keep intact the spirit of their origins, to respond adequately to the needs of evangelization in the contemporary world.” The official biography printed by the Vatican for his beatification said that he was “one of the most creative apostles of the 20th century,” and talked about how he discovered his vocation. He was 16. It was the night of December 31, 1900, and he spent four hours in prayer as we changed from the 19th to the 20th century. A “particular light” seemed to come from the Host and roused in him a sense of obligation “to do something for the Lord and for the people of the new century”: he felt “obliged to serve the Church” with the new instruments provided by human ingenuity. After priestly ordination when he was 23 and service in a parish, he became a spiritual director to seminarians in Alba where he also taught, helped out with preaching, gave catechesis and conferences in various parishes of the diocese. He came to understand that the Lord was guiding him toward a new mission: to preach the Gospel to all peoples, in the spirit of the Apostle Paul, using the modern instruments of communication. On August 20, 1914, Fr. Alberione initiated the Pauline Family in Alba by founding the Pious Society of St. Paul. After founding the Daughters of St. Paul, he fell gravely ill and doctors thought he would die, but he says he was healed by St. Paul directly and had a dream in which Jesus told him not to be afraid and to enlighten. He founded the Pious Disciples of the Divine Master and everything began to grow. The spirituality he imparted was one of the kingdom: to follow Jesus as Master and Shepherd, “Way, Truth and Life,” to live in the kingdom like Mary, Mother, Teacher and Queen of Apostles, and to imitate as much as possible St. Paul as disciple and apostle. The goal that Fr. Alberione wanted his sons and daughters in the “Pauline family” to pursue above all was complete conformation to Christ: to embrace the whole Christ Way, Truth and Life with one’s entire being: mind, will, heart and physical energies. An hour before he died on November 26, 1971, St. Pope Paul VI visited him and blessed him. Two years earlier, in an audience, St. Paul VI had said about him in his presence, “There he is: humble, silent, tireless, always vigilant, recollected in his thoughts, which run from prayer to action; always intent on scrutinizing the ‘signs of the times,’ that is, the most creative ways to reach souls. Our Fr. Alberione has given the Church new instruments with which to express herself, new means to give vigor and breadth to her apostolate, new capacities and a new awareness of the validity and possibilities of his mission in the modern world with modern means. Dear Fr. Alberione, allow the Pope to rejoice in your long, faithful and tireless work and in the fruits it has produced for the glory of God and the good of the Church.” Today the whole Church rejoices in that work of bringing so many to glorify God. Today we rejoice at how he built his life solidly on Christ and helped so many others to hear his word and live it.
• Today we come to Mass to build ourselves anew on Christ the cornerstone. We come to allow him to make us strong not with gold, silver, bronze or iron, but with his own trust in the Father, with his own power of love, with his own body and blood, as he seeks to make us into a temple that will never be destroyed and to take us united with him to the celestial Jerusalem to rejoice with him and all the saints.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel Lk 21:5-11

While some people were speaking about
how the temple was adorned with costly stones and votive offerings,
Jesus said, “All that you see here–
the days will come when there will not be left
a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.”

Then they asked him,
“Teacher, when will this happen?
And what sign will there be when all these things are about to happen?”
He answered,
“See that you not be deceived,
for many will come in my name, saying,
‘I am he,’ and ‘The time has come.’
Do not follow them!
When you hear of wars and insurrections,
do not be terrified; for such things must happen first,
but it will not immediately be the end.”
Then he said to them,
“Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
There will be powerful earthquakes, famines, and plagues
from place to place;
and awesome sights and mighty signs will come from the sky.”