Turning Ten Times More to Be Rebuilt by God’s Mercy, Feast of the Dedication of St. Patrick’s, October 5, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Feast of the Dedication of the Cathedral of St. Patrick
Memorial of St. Faustina Kowalska (and Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos)
October 5, 2019
Bar 4:5-12.27-29, Ps 69, Lk 10:17-24

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• As Catholics in New York celebrate the feast of the anniversary of the dedication of the mother church of this Archdiocese, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, we remember that the anniversary of the dedication of a Church is meant to get us to focus on the reality of the Church, which is not main of marble, wood, bricks and glass but men, women, boys and girls, “living stones” built on Christ the Cornerstone. As we thank God for the gift of his presence in the tabernacle within Our Lady’s Chapel in the Cathedral, we recall that that presence dwelled among us from the time of the incarnation in a particular way and how Jesus, the true Temple destroyed and rebuilt on the third day, incorporates us into him by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that we may truly be, as St. Paul says, a “Temple of God.” The anniversary of the dedication of a Church is meant to lead to our reconsecration as temples of God’s glory.
• For the past two weeks in the first reading at Mass, we have been listening to five prophets speaking about the rebuilding of the (second) Temple in Jerusalem after the exile and destruction of the (first) Temple. We’ve heard from Ezra, Haggai, Zechariah, Nehemiah and today, for the second of two times in two years, Baruch. Next week we’ll finish with Jonah, Malachi and Joel. Today Baruch tries to encourage the Israelites not to be afraid, for although they had committed serious sins, angered God, and were suffering punishment as a result of them, God wanted them not to be destroyed but healed. He remembers them. He wants to save them and bring them back “enduring joy.” Hence Baruch says, “As your hearts have been disposed to stray from God, turn now ten times the more to seek him.” The new Temple would be built by God’s mercy. We’re called to run to his mercy ten times more for every time we’ve abandoned him through sin.
• Today the Church celebrates the memorial of St. Faustina Kowalska, who is the “secretary” of God’s mercy, helping us to see that just as we’re called to run ten times into his merciful outstretched arms, he is perpetually running toward us. In the Gospel, the seventy-two disciples rejoice that the demons were subject to them because of Jesus’ saving name. They were able to make Satan “fall like lightning from the sky.” That’s what happens in the Sacrament of God’s mercy, when we receive it and when we share it. Satan’s proud self-exaltation is abased. His poison is stripped of its power. Jesus later in the Gospel rejoiced that the Father has hidden the things of his kingdom from the wise and the clever of the age but revealed them to the childlike, those precisely like St. Faustina. Today we rejoice with her that her name has been written in heaven. Today we rejoice that our eyes have seen the image of divine mercy Jesus asked her to paint, with his hand perpetually raised in blessing of us with the mercy that flows from his wounded side in the Sacraments. Today we rejoice to hear through her Jesus’ words that even if the most hardened sinner turns to him and asks for mercy, he will receive it. These are words that the ancient Israelite exiles longed to hear. This is the blessing every sinner longs to see.
• St. Faustina’s vocation is an illustration of how Jesus reveals himself and the Father who is Rich in Mercy to the childlike. She received her vocation when she was a 7-year-old child, praying before the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, and wanted to enter the convent after completing her schooling, but her parents refused to give permission. Her parents put her to work at 16 cleaning houses to make money for the family. When she was 19 she went with her sister to a public dance in her hometown of Lodz and during the dance she had a vision of the suffering Jesus. She then ran to the cathedral where Jesus told her to leave for Warsaw immediately and join a convent. She obeyed, packing a bag that night and getting on the train, without her parents’ permission and without knowing anyone at all in Warsaw. There she entered a church and asked the priest for guidance as to what community she should join. She approached various convents only to experience rejection, that they weren’t interested in accepting “maids.” They were so wise and clever in not accepting someone like Faustina that they were rejecting not only a future saint but also the One who had sent her and would choose her to be the means by which he would make his mercy more greatly known. Eventually she found the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, who told her that they’d accept her provided she could pay for her habit. She worked for a year for the money and then entered. Beginning in 1931, three years after her first vows, Jesus started to appear to her and reveal to her the message of his mercy. With childlike trust and receptivity, she began to document this in her diary. She suffered for doing so. The first thing that happened when she said to a priest that she was receiving these messages was that she was sent to a psychiatrist. Several of the other sisters began to get jealous of her, why she was something special, when they had so many more talents. But she trusted in God’s providence and in Jesus’ words. He revealed to her how often his mercy is rejected, either directly or indirectly through not opening ourselves up to its abyss. Through her, he said, he wanted to try to give people another chance. He wanted to give them the chance to run back ten times if they needed to, or seventy-times seven. The message of divine mercy he conveyed to her reemphasizes what Jesus himself said in the Gospel, that we need his mercy, that he wants us to receive it in the way he established on Easter Sunday Evening (the Sacrament of Reconciliation and Penance), and that he wants us to share that mercy with others. It wasn’t enough for Jesus that we merely know these realities, but he wanted us to grow in veneration and love for these realities. That’s why he revealed to St. Faustina five practices he wanted us to engage in to grow of our recognition of how much we need his merciful love, how frequently we come to receive it, and how lavishly we receive it: to behold him in the image of divine mercy, to turn to him at the hour of mercy at 3 pm, to pray a chaplet of divine mercy on Rosary beads, to celebrate the Feast of Divine Mercy as the culmination of the Easter Octave and to prepare for it with a novena of prayer for particular classes of people, starting on Good Friday.
• Today the Church in the U.S. likewise celebrates Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, whose name was written in heaven because of the way he exercised and preached that very mercy God would later communicate to St. Faustina. Blessed Francis Xavier was born in Bavaria in 1819 and as a child recognized a strong desire to be a priest. Soon after meeting the Redemptorists, who have always had a special charism to bring people to conversion and to receive God’s mercy in Confession, he entered the Congregation in order to minister to German speaking immigrants to the U.S. He arrived in New York City at the age of 24 in 1843 and was eventually ordained in Baltimore. He served in Pittsburgh with St. John Neumann, who served as his spiritual director and confessor and pastoral guide, and he began to receive everyone as he would want to receive Christ, people in various languages, black and white and so much more. He served later in Baltimore, Cumberland (MD), Annapolis, and Detroit, preached Missions in Connecticut, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin, before being transferred as a pastor to New Orleans, where he cared for those dying of yellow fever and contracted the disease from which he died on October 4, 1867, at the age 48. He was a means of mercy for so many. He was beatified on April 9, 2000, at a ceremony I was privilege to attend, three weeks before St. Faustina was canonized (which I was also able to attend)!
• As we prepare to offer to the eternal Father his beloved Son’s body, blood, soul and divinity, in expiation for our sins and those of the whole world, we thank him for the gift of his Mercy, incarnate in his Son, we thank him for revealing His Son to us, for hearing our poor cries, for allowing us to hear his voice and see his glory, for making Satan fall from the sky, and for seeking, in saving us, to bring us enduring joy, by giving us the means so that our names may, with Faustina’s and Francis Xavier’s, be written in heaven!

The readings for today’s Mass were: