Holy Family...Holy Moly!

Listen to homily
Praise the Lord! Upon my decision to become a priest, my parent's first response was less than enthusiastic. Sorry Dad and Mom, but its true. I came home on Easter Sunday morning of the Jubilee year of 2000 and told them that God was calling me to give my life to him as a Roman Catholic priest of Jesus Christ. Jaw-dropping for them to say the least. Not have any more grandkids...how could you do this to us? However, in time they have come to be supportive and open to this vocation, this calling of mine. Since entering priesthood, I have not felt more fulfilled in all my years of earthly existence...all thirty-one years of life. Recently, I had heard that there were priests in the Diocese who had heard the rumor that I was not happy with priesthood and would potentially be leaving. For all those who are listening to this homily that will be podcasted this afternoon, let me emphatically say, “I will always be a priest of Jesus Christ and there is nothing I would rather do with the life God has given me than to be his priest!” I believe there is nothing more noble than being a priest of Jesus Christ and I will defend priesthood, as it is now in the Catholic Church, with all my strength until my dying days. Priesthood is essential because authentic fatherhood is essential to any healthy civilization. Emily, a friend who recently joined an up-and-coming religious community in Illinois wrote this about priesthood:

I love the Catholic Priesthood.
It represents the wisdom and mercy of God the Father
as instituted by Jesus Christ His Son for our salvation.
There could hardly be a (bad) Catholic priest who could
convince me to stop loving the priesthood.
My heart breaks over the pathetic, sinful, dry, lukewarm,
indifferent, and misdirected ones...
yet something deep within me—deeper than words--
compels me still to respect and even admire their
ordination, even while finding the man disagreeable.
And what can compare to a holy priest?
As Paul recalls th treatments he received from the Galatians:
they welcomed him as if he were an angel of God, or
even Jesus Christ Himself. (Galatians 4:14)
It is not difficult to see why this welcome was so affectionate.
The holy priest is in many ways like the Crucified Christ--
he draws all to himself,
he is painfully aware of his friends and enemies (like the two men crucified next to Christ)
he constantly, by his words and life cries out to God for mercy,
he tends to the needs of his flock, like Jesus' concern for John & Mary,
and he experiences within the same moment the faith of paradise
and the hunger for the beatific vision, absent from his present experience.
This, in fact, may be a real source of suffering.
He is zealous and meek and altogether needed by the Christian faithful. It is then, I think, impossible for me to give up my love for the priesthood without giving up my love for Christ, who Himself is a priest. And the priest, for me, is Christ.

Today is the feast of the Holy Family and without holy families we will not have holy priests and sisters. Our vocation crisis is not to consecrated life, but to community life. We are suffering from a lack of holy families these days. The vocation to authentic marriages is the crisis of vocations, not the priesthood. Men and women consecrating their lives to God come from families who are open to life. With that being said, let me address the importance of family and the crucial implications the family has in creating a culture of life. There are four forces working against family. Four problems if you will. They are:
1) A culture of death rather than a culture of life—abortion, euthanasia, and contraception
2) A placing of the ego of the individual over the charity of authentic communal living
3) Secular media and mainstream media pagan propaganda
4) Idolatry—placing sports, events, social function over worship of God

These forces are the forces of Herod that we hear in today's gospel. The more things change the more more they stay the same. In our case today perhaps even more sinister. The angel tells Joseph in a dream, “Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him.” There are forces like Planned Parenthood and other agencies of death today that are no different than Herod...searching for the children to destroy them. To destroy family.

Culture of Death Contraception and Abortion
John Paul the Great, the defender of life said this in 1998 to a group of bishops, “We are coming to the end of a century which began with confidence in humanity's prospects of almost unlimited progress, but which is now ending in widespread fear and moral confusion. If we want a springtime of the human spirit, we must rediscover the foundations of hope. Above all, society must learn to embrace once more the great gift of life, to cherish it, to protect it, and to defend it against the culture of death, itself an expression of the great fear that stalks our times. One of your most noble tasks as Bishops is to stand firmly on the side of life, encouraging those who defend it and building with them a genuine culture of life.”

The culture of death versus the culture of life. What is at stake is the human spirit itself! What is at stake is the future of a civilization. Is this too dramatic? Do you think Father Quinn may be exaggerating? Consider the fact that Europe's population is steadily declining and in threat of being swallowed up by civilizations that are simply having more babies with the United States in fast pursuit. In effect, with 4000 abortions everyday....with 4000 babies killed each day we are killing ourselves. CBS a mainstream media venue said this back in 2003, “The natural increase in Europe's population is slowing and may start a steep decline within a few decades, researchers say. Researchers writing in the journal Science said European population growth reached a turning point in the year 2000 when the number of children dropped to a level that statistically assured there will be fewer parents in the next generation than there are in the current generation. In effect, the authors say, the momentum for population growth in the 15-nation European Union has flipped from positive to negative and the trend could strongly influence population numbers throughout the 21st century. “If the current fertility rate of around 1.5 births per woman persists until 2020, negative momentum will result in 88 million fewer people in 2100, if one assumes constant mortality and no net migration,” the researchers say. The EU population in 2000 was about 375 million.” The cause...contraception and abortion....the culture of death....literally. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/27/world/main546441.shtml

And we shun large families calling it economically infeasible so we contracept, sterilize, abort, and find even more sinister ways to avoid bringing life into the world to keep our convenience and high standard of living. Do I even have to mention the current scandal of the RU-485 case? A man using the abortion pill to kill. How can this be illegal when RU485 is legal according to our “just” government, when in 1996, the FDA declared RU-486 “safe and effective.” Okay, guys, how “safe and effective” was the drug in this particular case or any case for that matter?
http://www.speakout.com/activism/issue_briefs/1137b-1.html

Or how about just this month, December 13th, State Assembly passed a bill Assembly Bill (AB) 377, Assembly Substitute Amendment 1 that forces hospitals and health care providers to provide sexual assault victims with so-called "emergency contraception" that can cause very early chemical abortions. The bill contains no protection for those who object to dispensing an abortion-causing drug on religious or conscience grounds. A procedural move stopped final passage of the bill which will likely occur January 16, 2008.

I visit a lot of families and I can tell you that it is very easy to meet a couple who believes the Church's teaching and is open to life to a family that does not welcome life. I'll go with the families who are open to life any day. This is where I find trust, authentic love, sacrifice, true commitment to one-another, and abandonment to God's divine providence. This is heroic virtue. Natural Family Planning and means of effect family planning are legitimate and there has been a silence in the Church for too long, an embarrassment almost of proclaiming the truth. We must be open to life because if we are not, we are not open to Christ because Christ is life. We must learn about the teachings of the Catholic Church on life and ultimately it comes to our faith. Do we believe the Church's teaching is a reflection of God's divine law? Or is John Paul the Great, Benedict XVI, Paul VI and the rest of the hierarchy just plan crazy. In 1968 a document called Humane Vitae (On Human Life) was promulgated and one of the consequences of a contraceptive mentality was that, “...a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.” It appears that the Church was on to something back in the sixties when we look at how women have been objectified more than ever in today's day and age.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html

Individualization rather than community
Another problem of the family is the placing of the ego of the individual over communal living. In the family we have there can be an evasion of any sense of community living when we place ourselves ahead of the other. F.A.M.I.L.Y stands for Forget About Me, I Love You. Do we forget ourselves and put others before us or are we so wrapped up in our own selfish desires that we fail to place others before us. Our second reading addresses this very problem, “Put on, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved,heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do. And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection.” The family must be vigilent on this front. The family must always pay attention to how the culture of death seeks to destroy this basic unit of governance. We can eat together, prayer together, spend time together and all these activities of union and communion come from a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Secular Media and mainstream media paganism
Need I describe this social ill. The secular media is not in support of the family, yet as Catholics we let our way of life continually be bashed in by anti-Christian propaganda. We fit as many flat screen televisions in our house as possible. We have media streaming into our lives and allow it to distort the authentic meaning of family. Why do we not combat these venues of vice with ministries in our own parishes producing our own media? We should have a media ministry going at St. Pius that pumps families with good viewing opportunities. We should always be conscious of what comes into our home whether as music, video, or Internet.

Idolatry
The Webster definition of idolatry is the, “immoderate attachment or devotion to something.” If sporting events on Sunday or sporting events in general are a priority in your family over Sunday or Saturday evening worship, you are practicing idolatry. In essence, you are telling God that you would rather worship sports and competition over worship of God. I can not tell you how many kids I hear in confession that they don't go to Church on the weekend because their parents have them signed up for a ton of sports. And if I may address the hockey coaches and leagues out there...STOP SCHEDULING GAMES on Sunday mornings! A family focused on anything other than giving God one hour a week is falling short of its responsibility to honor God. Think of it....one hour a week. That gives us 167 hours for the rest of the week. That's really not a bad deal!

The solution—Tradition!
US News and World Report had a December 13th article entitled, “A Return to Tradition.” This caught my attention. I found this fascinating. “Tony Jones, author of The New Christians: Dispatches From the Emergent Frontier and national coordinator of Emergent Village, talks about the postmodern aspects of the new traditionalism. People of the postmodern mindset—particularly 20- and 30-somethings—question the hyper individualism of modern culture. They search for new forms of community but tend to be wary of authority figures and particularly of leaders, Jones says, who take divisive liberal or conservative social-political positions—one reason why the emergent groups tend to be anti pastoral. "The problem is not the issues," says Jones, who belongs to an emergent church, Solomon's Porch, in Minneapolis. "The problem is how we talk about issues. We are going to live in reconciliation with each other, and traditional practices are what restore us and hold us together." The young neotraditionalists also have an almost intuitive attraction to liturgy, ritual, and symbol as forms of knowledge that complement the dominant rational, scientific one. "There is a certain kind of postmodern sensibility that loses confidence in the rational explanation of everything," McLaren says. For him, Jones, and others, "doing church" in traditional and innovative ways is a form of theological reflection that leaves behind the fundamentalists' need to make all religious propositions into pseudoscientific statements, to turn Genesis, for example, into a geology textbook."
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/national/2007/12/13/a-return-to-tradition.html

Family is traditional, yet families can innovative. We can find ways to be like Mary and Joseph, protecting the Christ child, our children from the world that seeks to destroy. We are encouraged by the Holy Family because they are a traditional family and it is in the solace of tradition that we can build a civilization of love.