Salve, Regina, Mater Misericordine.
Mother of good counsel, pray for us.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Praised be Jesus and Mary.
Amen.
Perhaps it's never easy for a new priest to give homilies.
For lack of experience, maybe even a bit of lack of authority, one could say, for these and for many other reasons.
That's why today, maybe I would just like to share with you a couple of simple and hopefully brief reflections on the Gospel,
which I hope to have assimilated during my formation as a Franciscan friar and priest of the Immaculate.
Our Lord says in the Gospel,
Do you think that I have come...
Do you think that I have come to establish peace on the earth?
No, I tell you, but rather division.
When we hear these words of the Gospel, perhaps we are struck to be hearing them from Him who in the book of Isaiah is called the Prince of Peace.
We are perhaps surprised to hear them coming from that very same Lord who said to His Apostles,
Peace I leave you, my peace I give to you.
In what way, then, are we to intend these words, this division which our Lord says,
Peace I leave you, my peace I give to you?
And we find a guiding light to help us discover the answer in that very same passage of St. John,
where our Lord does indeed say,
Peace I leave you, my peace I give to you.
But right afterwards, immediately afterwards adds,
Not as the world gives, do I give it to you.
Because there is a fundamental and essential difference between the peace our Lord gives us
and the peace which the world seeks and offers.
Our Lord's peace...
the one which He gives to those who believe in Him and follow Him,
is that of which St. Paul speaks in his letter to the Philippians,
the peace of God that surpasses all understanding
and which will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
That peace which includes in it friendship with God,
tranquility of mind, and calm in temptations and persecutions,
and mutual concord among ourselves,
and the bond of mutual charity.
That unspeakable peace which begins,
which begins here on earth,
and which will last for eternity.
While the peace of the world,
the empty and fleeting satisfaction it offers in its illicit pleasures,
can be compared to the precarious peace of the sailor
who, resting on the ship deck in the middle of unpredictable waters of the sea,
believes himself to be resting on firm ground,
but is wrong,
as one medieval scholar put it.
So this separation of which our Lord speaks,
as one commentator of the Gospel says,
means that our Lord will separate His faithful Christian people
by reason of their faith from unbelievers.
But the unbelievers will, on their part,
take occasion to separate themselves from the faithful
and will hate them, unfortunately,
and will deprive them of liberty and goods,
and even of their lives.
The Gospel of our Lord has always been in conflict
with what we call the world.
The world, of course, intended not as all of creation,
the universe and earth we live in,
which insofar as it comes from the hands of God
and bears His mark, is good, of course,
but rather the world as that created reality
which rebels itself against its creator,
against His laws,
which believes, professes, and promotes a doctrine
completely contrary to that of the Gospel,
an anti-Gospel in the strict sense of the word, we could say.
And of this anti-Gospel, we have constant examples,
very many in America,
so many that we don't even have to think of them,
they're constantly present in the news and right before us.
But maybe we'll be struck more if we consider a more,
so to speak, exotic example, a very recent one,
which in a very clear way illustrates
the ever more blatantly hostile stance of the world
towards the Gospel and its values.
When the central European country of Hungary, for example, in 2011,
after having approved a new national constitution
which recognized the country's Christian roots
and defended basic Christian values,
decided as a consequence to employ European Union funds
to promote its pro-life anti-abortion campaign,
the reaction of the European Union was simply ferocious,
and it is so to this very day.
The European Commission began studying the law,
the case without delay,
and responded very clearly,
perhaps too clearly,
and I quote the words of a liberal European politician,
the Commission made it very clear,
using EU money from the progress program
or any other EU source
to promote an anti-abortion campaign is an abuse
and is incompatible with EU values.
Promoting life is incompatible with EU values.
The European Union had the anti-abortion campaign stopped
and made it clear
that its funding was supposed to be destined
to promote gender equality,
and all of us know just too well what that means.
Commenting this perennial conflict,
of which we have just heard one example,
one among countless others,
Pope Benedict XVI in his powerful homily,
given on the occasion of the consecration of four new bishops,
which happened this year on January 6th,
said,
the humility of faith,
of sharing the faith of the Church of every age,
will constantly be in conflict
with the prevailing wisdom
of those who cling to what seems certain.
Anyone who lives and proclaims the faith of the Church
is on many points out of step
with the prevalent way of thinking,
even in our own day.
Today's reignant agnosticism
has its own dogmas
and is extremely intolerant
regarding anything that would question it
and the criteria it employs.
But the Pope continues,
the approval of the prevailing wisdom
is not the criterion to which we submit.
Our criterion, for us Christians that is,
is the Lord himself.
If we defend his cause,
we will constantly gain others to the way of the Gospel.
But, inevitably,
we will also be beaten by those who live lives opposed to the Gospel,
and then we can be grateful for having been judged worthy
to share in the passion of Christ.
If the world hates you,
realize that it hated me first,
our Lord reminds us.
And he himself,
by his passion and his cross,
has given us the example to follow,
so that fixing our eyes on him,
as St. Paul says,
we may not grow weary and lose heart.
Perhaps in our struggle against sin
we have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood,
and perhaps that sacrifice will not be asked of our generation,
but the successor of the Apostles,
and all Christians we can add here,
must also expect to be repeatedly beaten
by contemporary methods, that is,
the Pope underlines.
And these contemporary methods
we could take to mean as those unjust laws
which punish good and promote evil,
as those canals of mass media
which only promote confusion and lies,
magnifying evil and hiding the good,
and which, with their power of creating public opinion,
can truly kill a person in the eyes of the world.
Therefore,
the courage to contradict the prevailing mindset
is particularly urgent today,
and the words of the Pope directed to the new bishops
go to all of us.
The Christian must be courageous,
and this courage or forcefulness
does not consist in striking out
or in acting aggressively,
but rather in allowing oneself to be struck
and to be steadfast before the principles
of the prevalent way of thinking.
The courage to stand firm in the truth,
is unavoidably demanded of those
whom the Lord sends like sheep among wolves.
Those who fear the Lord will not be timid,
says the book of Sirach.
The fear of God frees us from the fear of men.
It liberates, the Pope concludes.
If peace can be defined with St. Augustine
as the tranquility of order,
we shouldn't marvel then at the fact
that we will not find such external peace in this world,
which by its own doctrine,
shameless example, laws,
and sometimes, or even frequently,
by force, promotes a rampant disorder
and dissolution of all truth and of all values.
We know that we belong to God,
says St. John in his first epistle,
and the whole world is under the power of the evil one.
Do not love the world or the things of the world,
therefore, the apostle continues,
because if anyone loves the world,
the love of the Father is not in him,
for all that is in the world,
sensual lust, enticement for the eyes,
and a pretentious life,
is not from the Father,
but is from the world.
A well-known 20th century French Catholic thinker,
Jacques Maritain,
despite the objections that could elsewhere be made
to his thought and his writings,
in one of his works at least,
made the following correct observation.
In our day and age,
gone are those times when society
could still form an honest man.
Gone are the times when a passive,
lukewarm indifference
was enough to save one's soul in this world,
when one could go with the stream,
to use an expression,
and manage to avoid damnation at the same time.
The kingdom of heaven suffers violence,
our Lord says,
and the violent are taking it by force.
That is, those who are willing to suffer temptations,
difficulties, persecution, and adversities,
with force and courage,
in order to acquire it.
We live in an epoch of values and anti-values today,
and we have to cling to either one or the other,
and there is no other choice.
Crying out with the psalmist,
Lord, come to my aid,
we must all make a good examination of conscience,
and renew our resolutions,
asking ourselves,
in those questions of Catholic doctrine,
and moral teaching,
which touch upon the most fundamental
values of human and Christian existence,
and which today are most at stake.
Do I courageously follow the gospel,
or rather the world?
Which gospel do I profess with my own life?
Am I ready to resist to the point of being beaten by the world,
as the Pope put it,
to the point of shedding my blood for Christ and his gospel?
Because the Christian soul cannot compromise any longer
with the world, unfortunately,
cannot remain passive in face of its insistences,
we must either reject the world and its false dogmas,
or we will be submerged by them,
forced by them,
more or less consciously,
through the wide gate and the broad road,
which leads to perdition.
Do not be yoked with those who are different,
with unbelievers,
St. Paul exhorts us.
For what partnership do righteousness and lawlessness have?
Or what fellowship does light have with darkness?
What accord has Christ with Beliar?
Or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever?
What agreement has the temple of God with idols?
For we are the temple of the living God.
As God said,
I will live with them and move among them,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
Therefore, we can conclude with St. Paul,
come forth from them and be separate,
says the Lord,
and touch nothing unclean.
Then I will receive you,
and I will be a father to you,
and you shall be sons and daughters to me,
says the Lord Almighty.
Praised be Jesus and Mary.
Amen.