We Need More than a Patch, 13th Saturday (II), July 4, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Mass for Independence Day
Memorial of St. Elizabeth of Portugal and Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati
July 4, 2020
Amos 9:11-15, Ps 85, Mt 9:14-17

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

To following points were made in today’s homily: 

• Today as the United States marks its 244th birthday as a nation and we focus, on independence day, on freedom, not only on the historical liberation from King George III and the United Kingdom but on what our freedom is for, what Madison described as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We Christians can deepen these aims of freedom expressed in the Declaration by the Biblical ideas of zoe (not just biological life but the higher life of the soul that Christ came to give us to the full), freedom (Christ has set us free precisely so that we might love God and others by his standard), and the pursuit of happiness (which is far more than pleasure, and meant to last far more than even 244 years, through the pursuit of holiness). The United States of America was formed with this deeper context in mind, to allow for the possibility of fulfilling it. But for that to be achieved, we need a revolutionary spirit in every generation, the courage of many of our founding fathers to be willing to risk their lives for this ideal, and to remember what so many of them remarked, that if we’re going to have a republic conceived in liberty remain, the citizens must use their liberty in a particular way, tied to responsibility. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, as John Adams once wrote, and it is fit for no other. So today is a good today, helped by today’s readings, to ponder that reality.
• In today’s first reading, we finish a week-long prayerful examination of the Prophet Amos. He was sent by God from Tekoa south of Jerusalem in the Kingdom of Judah to prophesy in the Kingdom of Israel to the north about the rampant injustice taking place there, the infidelity of the professional priests and prophets, of businessmen, of average Joshuas and Miriams. Throughout the book Amos constantly points out the failure of the people to live justly. They were prosperous and had begun to live for money, marginalizing God, selling off needy people for goods, oppressing the poor, taking advantage of the helpless, men were using women for pleasure. They needed a deep conversion and Amos was unsparing. Many were frightened as a result. Today we get to the last five verses, which foretell the consolation that awaits if they turn back to the Lord and to justice and charity in their relations with others. Through Amos God promises mercy, to “raise up the fallen hut of David … and rebuild it as in the days of old.” He promises that “the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the vintager, him who sows the seed; the juice of grapes shall drip down the mountains, and all the hills shall run.” Those are incredible images, saying that people will not be able to plant or crush grapes fast enough and that there will be tremendous fruit and joy, like grapes running down a mountain.
• In the Gospel, we see how all of this would be fulfilled. Jesus uses two images to describe how his people need to receive and respond the fulfillment of Amos’ prophecies. The first image is that of a patch. He says no one sews a new patch on an old set of clothing, because the new patch when it shrinks will tear the old fabric. Jesus has come not to patch up the difficulties in Judaism, but rather to give us new clothing. He has come to clothe us in himself. He has come to give us a baptismal garment, which is the garment that the sons and the daughters of the wedding chamber — whom he refers shouldn’t be mourning but celebrating, not fasting but feasting — are to wear eternally. Jesus is describing a revolutionary newness to the way we are supposed to relate to him. He is not coming to bring us from 95 to 100. He is coming to give us a new life. But we need a new receptivity to be able to embrace that gift. We also see that Jesus uses the word “fullness” in his expression of how the fullness of the patch will lead to the tearing. Jesus is that fullness. He contains all of God’s divinity. And we need to be the proper type of receptacle in order to receive that fullness.  And that leads us to the second image of Jesus employs. Jesus says that we do not pour new wine into old wineskins; we need new wine skins that will breathe as the new wine is fermenting so that neither wine nor wineskins will be lost. Jesus is describing for us that we need to receive him who is the new wine in a totally different way that many of the Jews were. Receiving the new wine of his new life is not going to work in the taut wineskins of a rigid Judaism. What is needed is the fullness of a new form of relating to God that Jesus is giving, bringing to fulfillment what he had revealed to the Jews in days prior. This type of newness was not just what the people of Jesus’ time needed, or what those at the time of Amos required. It’s something that people of every generation need, including our own, on the Fourth of July 2020. We need not just a series of small adjustments, new programs and policies. We need a new national heart. The events of recent days, hyper acerbic politics, the coronavirus pandemic, the exposure of the national wound of racism, the violence following upon protests, bad Supreme Court decisions, can leave all of us wondering what will become of this country. But God gives us the pathway to renewal, if we follow it. The people of Amos’ time basically didn’t, and the Kingdom of Israel was overrun, most of the people were slain by the Assyrians, and others brought into captivity. We need to learn from their mistakes.
• And when we receive this new set of clothes and drink of the wine flowing down the mountain we’re called to rejoice. That’s what Jesus mentions in the first half of today’s Gospel. The disciples of St. John the Baptist came to Jesus and asked why his disciples were not fasting as they fasted with John and as the Pharisees were accustomed to fast. They didn’t dare accuse Jesus of not fasting, because they respectfully thought that he might be exceptional to what everyone else was doing. Jesus in response gave a very important principle. He asks how the groomsmen, how the bridesmaids, how those who are the closest of all to the bride and groom — literally “sons os the bridal chamber” — could possibly be fasting while the wedding celebration was ongoing. It would almost be sinful to fast, to mourn, when such a wedding feast is going on. And Jesus was describing that while he is with us, as he is fulfilling what Amos predicted, we should be full of joy, we should be feasting, we should be celebrating, and we should be happy to share the table with those who likewise want to share in the joy of the bridegroom, who is also the Divine physician, who would come to take our sins away and make an eternal celebration possible. By this image, Jesus is describing the type of joy he wants all of us to have as routine aspect of who we are. He would say later in this same Gospel passage, when the bridegroom is taken away from them — in the firm to take away is the same verb that would be used to describe the action of ripping Jesus out of the Garden of Gethsemane — it is then that we will fast. We will fast not the way others fasted, but we will fast in order to hunger for what God wants to give us as our nourishment, in order to enter into the passion of Jesus so that we might be able to receive the joy-filled fruits of that Paschal mystery.
• Today we celebrate three people who are models of the type of justice we are to have for God and for others, who show us what it looks like to be vested in Christ and to have wineskins to receive his self-outpouring.
• The first is St. Elizabeth of Portugal. She was 10 when she was betrothed to King Denis of Portugal in 1281, marrying him seven years later. She is famous for her care for the poor, both during his marriage as Queen and after her husband had died, when she entered as a third order Franciscan the Poor Clare convent in Coimbra she had founded. She sought to care for the poor and sick in obscurity. She would dress like some of her servants and head out to find the starving and the indigent, engaging them in conversation, providing food, arranging lodging, educating the children of poor nobles, and various other activities. During the famine in 1293, she provided for the needs of thousands with flour from the castle. She became the chief benefactor of three hospitals to care for the poor and various monasteries, Churches and chapels, to care for people’s spiritual needs. Her husband once, thinking her charity was excessive, once tried to stop her from taking food from their table to give to the poor. He saw that she was hiding some bread under her cloak and stopped her. She said a quick prayer and by the time she opened her cloak roses fell. She shows us the type of care for our neighbor that wasn’t present in the Kingdom of Israel and that needs to be present if the United States is going to remain truly united.
• The second great example today is Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, who shows us not only the type of receptivity that Jesus is seeking and all of us, a man who had the new wine skins to receive the wine of Jesus’ grace, a man who was fully vested in the new garment Jesus had come to give each of us, but a person who was fully a son of the wedding chamber, a person full of the joy that comes from knowing Jesus is with us today and always until the end of time. What has made blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati so popular across the centuries is not that he is, as many girls continue to say today, a holy hunk. It’s not because he is a countercultural type of St., as many young men today know: that he smoked a pipe, that he loved the outdoors, that he knew how to play pool, that he love the opera the theater and many other expressions of popular culture. The real reason why blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati is so popular today still is because he was full of joy. He was the life of the party. He lived as if the good news were true, as if it were the means by which Jesus’ joy would be in us and our joy would be brought to completion. And that is the source of the endless fascination of so many Catholics today, 80 years after Jesus called him as a son of the wedding chamber to the eternal wedding banquet. When Blessed John Paul II beatified Pier Giorgio Frassati in 1990, he called him a “man of the Beatitudes.” He was someone who recognized how blessed he was to live like Jesus went, as a man fully seeking the happiness that comes from poverty in spirit, from meekness, from being a peacemaker, from being pure of heart, from seeking holiness, from the willingness to be persecuted for the sake of our faith. He was true to the bridegroom until the end. He’s sought to make what made Jesus happy the real goal of his life. And he did all of this with the style that will never be forgotten. When Pier Giorgio Frassati was a young boy two things happened to him that had an enormous impact on his life. The first was contact with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. He knew that God was real. He knew that God was dwelling with him in the Holy Eucharist. And so he had a tremendous sense of the sacred that he never lost. Over the course of his few years of life on earth, he would often spend all night in adoration of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. His parents were once worried about him, and contacted the priest was the chaplain at his Catholic high school, thinking that their son was spending all night getting into trouble. Little did they know! And because of his communion with Jesus in the Eucharist, something that he received permission to receive every day, he began to have a communion with Jesus’s great love especially for those on the margins, those who were poor, those who were sick, those who are in most need. That leads us to the second great experience he had when he was a young boy. A poor family came to his home in Turin, begging for alms. Pier Giorgio answered the door, and when he saw a boy his old age, who had no shoes, he gave him his own shoes. Later when he was a little older, he encountered a poor man on the streets with no winter jacket. It was 10°F. Pier Giorgio immediately gave the shivering man his own winter jacket, something about which his father would become very angry. But the future blessed simply replied, “It was cold!” That would lead to a lifetime of charity in just a few years. He joined a local conference of St. Vincent de Paul, which led him eventually to take custody of hundreds of poor people. He was responsible for their medicine, their food, sometimes even their rent. He would spend all the money that was given him in care for the poor. He would dedicate his entire allowance to those in need, he gave all his high school graduation gifts to the poor, and he would often forsake the train in order to walk home so that the train money could be given to those who are in greater need. There’s one famous story that when a friend asked him why he was taking the third class on the train, even though as the son of the founder of the famous Italian newspaper La Stampa, who would be a senator in Italy and the future ambassador to Germany, he was easily able to afford the first class, which would be more in line with his aristocratic roots. Pier Giorgio replied that the reason he was in third class because there was no fourth class. He was keeping a tearful list of all those he was helping, to make sure none would fall through the cracks. Eventually he caught polio from one of the women for whom he was caring. He caught a particularly virulent form of the disease, one that would prove fatal in general within a week. He didn’t tell his family members because they were all caring for his grandmother who at the time was on her deathbed. But on the night before he died, he left a note for one of his friends who was with him in the St. Vincent De Paul conference describing how one of the poor for whom he was caring needed to receive his injections the following day. And he entrusted to his little sister the book in which he had listed all the poor he was helping, the money they needed, the food they needed, the medicine they needed, and so many other things. It was only then that she became aware of just how broad and apostolate of charity her brother, the man of the beatitudes, was exercising. His funeral is one of the most beautiful events in recent hagiography. After his death, his parents anticipated that he would have a funeral because many of the people of their class would show up to offer their condolences. They had no idea the thousands of poor people from Turin would also show up to the funeral. They had no idea why so many poor people were there. They soon found out. But the poor were also in for a surprise. The one who was caring for them used to call himself Fra Girolamo, because when he became a member of the third order of the Dominicans, he had taken the name Jerome (Girolamo in Italian) after one of his great heroes, Girolamo Savonarola. They had no idea that the one caring for them was a member of the famous Frassati family. But both his parents and his poor friends recognized in him a man who was absolutely full of joy, charity, in faith, someone who in short had reminded them that God was with them.
• The final example we remember on this Saturday is Our Lady, who radiates for us the joy, the receptivity, the newness portrayed in the new garments and new wineskins necessary to receive new patches and new wine. We know she was “full of grace,” because she was “full of God.” Her response to God was a perpetual fiat. It’s sin that tears a hole in clothing or in wineskins. It’s sin that makes clothes and wineskins tired, old and rigid. It’s sin that brings about in any age what eventually happened to the Kingdom of Israel. Mary’s sinlessness kept her always young, freely receptive to what God was doing. We call her the “cause of our joy” not only because she gave us the one who told us he was coming into the world so that his joy might be ours and our joy complete, but because she was always united with the Lord. Even when was ripped away, she went intentionally with him, so that where he was, she sought to be. We ask her intercession today that as we receive Jesus in Holy Communion and enter into a union with him as branches on the wine, we may so receive his gifts our baptismal garment and holy receptivity that we may allow his “wine” to flow through us and run up and down the mountains and valleys of the world! We ask through her intercession, that of St. Elizabeth of Portugal, Blessed Pier Giorgio, and all of the American saints, that we may become a nation where, as we prayed to God at the beginning of Mass today, “your peace may rule in our hearts and your justice guide our lives.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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