The Root of All Evil and the Path of Good, 24th Friday (I), September 17, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
400th Anniversary of the death of St. Robert Bellarmine
September 17, 2021
1 Tim 6:2-12, Ps 49, Lk 8:1-3

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’ peripatetic preaching, journeying with the Twelve apostles from one town to another preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom. This was a snapshot of his ordinary life, what occupied most of his days. He was announcing the kingdom and inviting people to enter. In the midst of all of their sufferings, hardships and up-until-then unfilled hopes, he was proclaiming the good news. He was helping them to see that Sacred Scripture was being fulfilled in their hearing, inviting them to strive to enter through the narrow gate, encouraging them to buy the treasure buried in a field and selling everything they have for the precious pearl of the kingdom. But St. Luke adds another detail, a very important one. He said that some women were accompanying Jesus and the apostles, women who had received Jesus’ healing power — they “had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities” — and wanted to spend their life, with faith and constancy, assisting him to heal others and raise them up. Three get named — Mary Magdalene, Joanna, the wife of Herod Antipas’ epitropos or money-man Chuza, and Susanna — but he also says “and many others,” who “provided for them out of their resources.” They were the ones who, to some degree, made possible Jesus’ and the apostles’ preaching, so that Jesus everyday wouldn’t have to multiply loaves and fish, so that they wouldn’t have to appall the hypersensensitive Scribes and the Pharisees by plucking heads of grain while walking through the fields. Like the widow with her two lepta placed in the Temple treasury, these women were giving all they had not just to make possible but to assist the preaching of the Gospel. They were the ones who were providing drink to lubricate Jesus’ and the apostles’ vocal chords. They were the ones who were making sure that they would have the necessary bread within their bodies to be able to preach that man doesn’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from God’s mouth. This was not a group of bored do-gooders who figured that these wandering 13 men would be lost without their feminine genius and maternal practicality. Having received much from the mercy of Jesus, as we heard yesterday, they loved much, and they wanted to give Jesus and his mission all the love, the time and the material goods they could. They’re a model for all of us in making the choice to serve God rather than mammon and to use whatever resources we have for the building up of the kingdom. They show us true poverty in spirit, treasuring God’s kingdom.
• This is in sharp contrast to what St. Paul warns St. Timothy about in the first reading: the false prophets, theological sophists, who use “religion to be a means of gain.” They were trying to fulfill their three-fold concupiscence off of religion, getting famous, becoming rich, and learning how to control people. The same temptation remains today of faking faith to profit in some material way. St. Paul says, in a shocking synthesis, that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Acquisitiveness, the worship of the ancient golden calf, is a spiritual cancer that metastasizes into all parts of life and leads, St. Paul describes, to conceit, arguments, verbal disputes, envy, rivalry, insults, evil suspicions,and mutual friction. So much harm comes when we’re trying to gain money. We use and hurt others. We throw them away when they’re not of use to us. When we place our treasure in mammon, we begin not to be satisfied with what we have, because there’s always someone with more mammon. We begin to think we never have enough, and in the pursuit of more, we destroy often our relationships with others, with the environment, with ourselves, and with God. The Psalm focuses on this, saying about money lovers that rather than trusting in and praising God, “They trust in their wealth; the abundance of their riches is their boast,” and reminds us that when someone dies, “his wealth shall not follow him down.”
• St. Paul describes another way, which he sums up as “religion with contentment.” It’s a way of living by faith-filled gratitude, content with what we have rather than obsessed about what we don’t have, happy with what God has provided rather than desirous of mammon, a lifestyle that doesn’t bring us down but lifts us up toward God. As St. Paul wisely reminds us, “We brought nothing into the world, just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it. If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.” That faithful spirit of thanksgiving allows us to “pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness.” It helps us to “compete well for the faith” and to “lay hold of eternal life,” because, like the letter to the Hebrews says about the first Christians, we permit ourselves to be stripped of earthly possessions because we have a far greater one! This is what only those who are poor in spirit, those who place their treasure in God, know.
• Today we celebrate the feast of someone who not only fought against the cancer of the evil of avarice and hype dependence on money but who also lived religion with contentment. St. Robert Bellarmine, who died 400 years ago today, was one of the great figures who helped the Church get back on track from the problems and scandals that led to the Protestant Reformation. In many places Catholics had become corrupt and sinful because of the love of money. The selling of indulgences was just the tip of the iceberg. There were various types of simony. There was the system of benefices that many fought to acquire simply for the income associated with them, rather than to fulfill the service those offices — dioceses, abbey and monasteries, parishes — required. They were, to use St. Paul’s words, “supposing religion to be a means of gain” and “in their desire for it have strayed from the faith.” The scandal produced by this love of money led many to have an excuse not to practice the faith and even to leave the Church. St. Robert worked patiently, with holy perseverance, to do everything he could to repair the Church after the Council of Trent and to heal the schism and bring people back to God. He guided popes. He wrote apologetic manuals. As a leader of the new seminary system that the Council had prescribed, he trained priests to be part of the solution rather than the problem. He labored to reunite those who had cut themselves off from the Church. He worked on the divide that had invaded the relationship between faith and science in his famous conversations with Galileo, after an occasionally stale and hardened philosophy was almost being raised to the point of dogma. We prayed at the beginning of Mass that God who so “adorned the Bishop Saint Robert Bellarmine with wonderful learning and virtue to vindicate the faith of your Church,” would help us to “always find joy” in the “integrity of that same faith.” He had integrity. His faith was whole. He united his whole life to God in religion with contentment and taught the clergy and faithful of the Church the same path. That’s why he is now a doctor of the Church, someone whose teachings we can follow with confidence.
• Today at Mass we receive the Gift that was his treasure, the Pearl of great price worth selling everything else to obtain. This is the source of religious contentment. He is the one for whom Mary Magdalene, Susanna, Joanna cared, and who strengthens us to go out to care for him in the disguise of others, with all the resources he places within us and at our disposal.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download