homilies
on the liturgy of the Sundays and feasts

by charles m. mangan

Real holiness
All Saints—November 1

“A” Readings: Rev. 7:2-4,9-14 • 1 John 3:1-3 • Matt. 5:1-12

Title: All Saints: The Communion of Saints
Purpose: To explain: (1) what sanctity is; and (2) sanctity as the goal of our life.

The goal of life is not, as some suggest, to get our “fifteen minutes of fame” but to gain eternal happiness with God in heaven. Delightful and inspiring as those saints are whom the Church honors with their own feast days, they do not belong to some kind of club of those who have “made it big” with God. If anything, the contrary is true—the saints with special feast days would each in their own ways praise the spectacular mercy of God’s grace that made them saintly at all. The vast multitudes who are remembered on this feast of All Saints have equally marvelous stories to tell about divine mercy, and eternity will not exhaust the telling.

The goal of life is eternal happiness with God, and the proper means to this goal is sanctity—the genuine holiness of becoming once again like God, in whose image we were made but whose likeness was lost with original sin and then further obscured by the ugliness of our actual sins.

Real holiness is blessed and beautiful. The beatitudes that Jesus teaches us in today’s Gospel portray the beauty that God would gladly restore to us. It was already early on in the course of his public ministry that Our Lord proclaimed them, confident that the beauty of being like God in each of these respects would be deeply appealing and would draw souls to actions and attitudes far different from the false allurements of the world. It may help to consider these beatitudes one by one, staying alert in each case to the aspect of holiness being described and the share in beatitude that each one promises.

Blessed are the poor in spirit. This is a detachment from the goods of this earth, such that we can treat whatever resources we have (even when they are considerable) as something to be used for God’s greater glory rather than as a measure of our own importance. “Theirs is the kingdom of God.” St Augustine insists that we begin to dwell in the city of God even while we are still living on this earth if there is a proper order to our loves, an order in which God alone is loved with all our mind and heart and soul and strength, an order in which we will love our neighbor as ourselves, and an order in which we will love any other possession only according to its possible use for the honor of God and the service of our neighbor. The poor in spirit live precisely according to that order of loves; even in this world they thus begin to inhabit the kingdom of God, a kingdom they will have fully in heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn; they shall be consoled. Presumably this beatitude refers to those who grieve for their dead, but not only to them. God’s gift of immortality to the soul will provide those who mourn eternal consolation when old friendships are restored in His presence during the life after death. Many commentators have also seen in this beatitude the spiritual consolation that comes when one mourns one’s sins. And this is the story of divine mercy received that so many of today’s saints will be anxious to tell—the deep and genuine consolation of God’s forgiveness and his powerful ways of refashioning the damage we have done to God’s likeness in us by our waywardness.

Blessed are the lowly, the humble, the meek. Here the resemblance to Christ is extremely direct, for it is certainly a humble God who chose to save us by becoming like us and by suffering in our place rather than simply decreeing our restoration without risk of suffering himself. The sanctity that is manifest in humility on our part may well mean foregoing certain things that we could claim in justice and yet that we are promised as our inheritance in the land of heaven.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for holiness—the accent here is on our admission that no one can achieve sanctity on one’s own. It is only by God’s gift that “they shall have their fill.” But the fact that grace is entirely a gift and never earned is no excuse for laziness or passivity or inaction. The hunger and thirst mentioned here are not our bodily desires for food and water but our constant begging of God for the sanctity we need to become his saints.

Blessed are the merciful; mercy shall they receive. Like the lines about forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer, this beatitude directs us to show others the compassion that we ourselves want to receive. Like the philosopher Nietzsche, many worldly souls deride Christian mercy as wimpish fear of asserting oneself, but in fact it is the backbone of Christian strength. It is our way of imitating the mercy of God who shows mercy to us.

Blessed be the single-hearted, the pure of heart, for they shall see God. We know too well that our hearts are divided and that we, like St. Paul, often want to do the better thing but end up doing the worse. This beatitude calls to a certain asceticism, to a renunciation of some things that we find attractive and that may be good in their own order, for the sake of what is greatest and highest, the service of God, whom we will be able to see the more sharply and fully by looking beyond the forest of goods and attractions that make us divided in heart.

Blessed also are the peacemakers—not just the great peacemakers of the world stage, but each one who labors for peace in our homes, in our places of work, and in our communities. As Augustine reminds us, true peace is not just the absence of war or conflict, but also the tranquility of order that comes from a right ordering in our loves. But as we noted above, this right order of loves will have us well-ordered to God and neighbor in a way that we will rightly be called God’s children.

The final subject of the beatitude can be the hardest one to hear: the suffering of persecution, insult, and slander for the sake of holiness. This has been the beatitude to which the martyrs have been called over the centuries, both the martyrs whose feasts are remembered in the church’s calendar with vestments red like the red of Christ’s blood, and the countless martyrs whose names are known only to God.

The ways of saintliness are many, and the very range of beatitudes testifies to the variety of ways in which all the saints whom we celebrate today have praised God. What is common to them is holiness, and to this we are called as well.

Suggested reading: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2013-2016; 2030; 946-959.

Helps to heaven
31st Sunday of the Year—November 3

“A” Readings: Mal. 1:14—2:2,8-10 • 1 Thes. 2:7-9, 13 • Matt. 23:1-12

Title: Precepts of the Church
Purpose: (1) to explain in general the six special Precepts of the Church and (2) why the Church has Precepts; and (3) to encourage their faithful observance.

In today’s Gospel Jesus contrasts the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees with their example. He clearly finds something hypocritical about the disparity—their refusal to help carry loads they have themselves piled on the backs of others, and their search for honors after preaching humility. But in denouncing these practices, Jesus in no way undermines their authority; in fact, he directs his listeners to do what the scribes and Pharisees prescribe, for they “have succeeded Moses as teachers.”

The first reading from the book of Malachi makes a similar point when the prophet chastises the leaders of the community for turning aside from the Lord’s way and causing many to falter by their instruction. The responsibilities of those entrusted with the rule of any community are great, and the sad fact of occasional failures makes us all the more mindful of the reason why we need constantly to pray for the leaders of the Church and for the leaders of our country, for their duties can be heavy and the temptations they experience can be grave.

Central to these passages of scripture is an important insight about the purpose of law and a crucial distinction between the authoritative and the authoritarian. Any law that is truly law, and not just authoritarian abuse of power, will always be a directive issued by the person in charge of the community for the common good. Theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas have reflected that declarations which have legal form but which attack the common good are unjust and may sometimes need to be resisted. In our own history, legally approved practices like slavery and abortion come to mind as cases where legal formality is cloaking something deeply unjust.

But Jesus’ teaching also covers another case—the case where what the authorities command is good and right but where the authorities themselves are hypocritical. In this scenario Our Lord directs his criticism at the authorities for abusing the powers with which they have been entrusted, but at the same time he reminds us that our obligations under the law still bind us. For the Jews of his day, it was a matter of observing not just those ten commandments but all the laws of ritual purity contained in the Torah. These were precepts laid down by Moses and his successors for the well-ordered life of the Jewish people.

From these ceremonial precepts of the Old Testament we Christians have been freed, and many of St. Paul’s letters explain the difference. We remain absolutely bound by the ten commandments of the Old Law and their restatement in the two great commandments of the New Law: we should love the Lord our God with all our mind and heart and soul and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves. But from precepts such as circumcision, kosher dietary laws, and the like we have been released. In their place the Church has established only a small number of precepts. While they are not at the same level of authority as God’s own list of commandments, they are truly law for us, for they have been issued by those in charge of our community as Catholic Christians, and they are for the common good.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that these precepts are moral and liturgical in character and have been formulated in order “to guarantee to the faithful the indispensable minimum in the spirit of prayer and moral effort, in the growth in love of God and neighbor” (#2041). There are six of them in force at present.

(1) The obligation to participate at Mass on Sundays and holy days directs the faithful to join together for prayer on that day of the week on which we recall Our Lord’s Resurrection. (2) The obligation to partake of the sacrament of reconciliation by going to confession at least once a year is designed to prepare us for a worthy reception of the Eucharist and thus to further the work of conversion and forgiveness begun in us at Baptism. (3) Although nowadays we seldom hear much preaching about our “Easter duty” (perhaps because most people do often come to communion weekly), there remains an “Easter duty”: “You shall humbly receive your Creator in a Holy Communion at least during the Easter season” (Canon 920). (4) We are to observe various holy days during the year. While modern working conditions often make it difficult to take a real holiday from our work on these days, we are still required in most dioceses to come to Mass for such feasts as the Immaculate Conception (December 8); Christmas (December 25); the Solemnity of the Mother of God (January 1); the Assumption (August 15); and All Saints Day (November 1). (5) The number of days prescribed for fasting and abstinence has been greatly reduced in our time, but Church law is still trying to indicate the need for penance and asceticism by specifying certain times of fasting and abstinence during Lent as part of our preparation for Easter. (6) Finally, according to canon 222, the faithful have the duty to provide for the material needs of the Church and its works of charity and social justice, each according to his abilities.

Why, we might ask, does the Church set down precepts like these? In all six cases it is quickly clear that the purpose of the law is not to lay heavy burdens upon us but rather to direct us to the praise and love of God and to the service of neighbor. That we are required to participate at Mass each Sunday and on special holy days and even to fast and abstain on occasion is our Christian way of observing the third commandment. The directives about confession and communion are designed to nourish our personal union with God and regularly to heal any wounds in that relationship that have come about by our sinfulness or selfishness. And the precept that directs us to works of sacrifice and charity for the needs of the Church, of our community, and especially of the poor help to specify certain ways in which we need to keep the second great commandment, the love and service of our neighbor.

These are directives for the common good, and the Church does well to provide them for us. The humility we exhibit by observing them flows from the final words of Our Lord in today’s Gospel: “The greatest among you will be the one who serves the rest. Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, but whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.”

Suggested reading: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2041-2043, 2048.

Freed from the fear of death
32nd Sunday of the Year—November 10

“A” Readings: Wisdom 6:12-16 • 1 Thes. 4:13-18 • Matt. 25:1-13

Title: Preparation for Death
Purpose: to describe (1) the importance of dying well and (2) the way to prepare for a good death.

Not long ago the Metropolitan Museum in New York featured an exhibition of four paintings by the Counter-Reformation artist Georges de la Tour. The show was called “Conversion by Candlelight” because of the fascinating play of light and darkness that is a signature trait in the paintings of de la Tour and because this quartet of paintings show us successive moments of Mary Magdalene’s conversion.

The first is a painting owned by the Met. It shows her seated before an elaborate gilt mirror, in which the candle that illuminates the whole scene is itself reflected. She has laid her fancy jewelry on the table, but she still wears the alluring clothing of a courtesan, a rich red brocade skirt and an off-white blouse with a plunging neckline. She stares up into space, clearly thinking hard about something, and that something may well be her near-death from stoning. As its visible reminder a skull sits on her lap.

The second painting is from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It reverses the perspective, and only the tip of the candle flame can be scene from behind the skull, which is now atop the jewelry box into which she has stuffed her finery. The mirror now has a much simpler wooden frame. What we can see in its mirror is the face of the skull, and Mary Magdalen is seeing death reflected there. She had come so close to it before Our Lord halted the mob by insisting that only the one without sin should cast the first stone. Only when all had dispersed had he spoken to her and told her to go and sin no more. She cannot get his words out of her mind.

In the third painting, now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, we see the scene again from the first perspective. The mirror and the jewelry box have disappeared, but they have been replaced by books, presumably the Scriptures, and by a wooden cross. Although her dress is now folded up over her knees and her blouse has slipped from her shoulders to just above her breasts, she is far less alluring than in her earlier décolletage. She can now fondle the skull of death on her lap as she gazes at the flame, the light of Christ in her life.

The final painting of the series is from the Louvre in Paris. As a whole, it seems more drab than the others. But since one painting was sold off by de la Tour before the others were painted, one might not have realized this contrast until the show at the Met brought them all together for the first time. What the brilliant flame does warmly illumine is her face and bare shoulders, and we find that they now have the softness and innocence of a baby’s flesh. Her contact with the light of Christ has meant the renewal of her innocence. And significantly the flame comes not from a candle now but from an oil lamp, renewable by the constant source of grace that comes with confession and penance.

Like the parable in today’s Gospel about the wise and foolish bridesmaids, Mary Magdalen has joined the ranks of the sensible and prudent. Her oil lamp can be refilled and she can thus stay ready and watching for the bridegroom. She knows not the day nor the hour, but her eyes are now open. Her story may be more dramatic than our own, but the basic lesson is the same.

Of particular significance is the continued presence in all four of these paintings of the skull, the sign of death. But what had seemed so deep a threat has been tamed. Death cannot be escaped and so the skull remains present throughout the series. But by her encounter with Christ and by the light He shines into her life, she need no longer fear death. In fact, as the Gospel teaches in another passage, we must die to ourselves just as she had to die to her old way of living, in order to live anew in Christ.

History does not record with certainty what became of Mary Magdalen, but there are two traditions long associated with her. In one account, she went off to France to found the first contemplative monastery. Like the woman of the intense gazes that we find in de la Tour’s paintings, the Mary of this tradition testifies to her belief in immortality by a life of contemplation, much in the spirit of the Mary who sat at Our Lord’s feet while Martha worried over the chores of the household. According to the other account, she founded the first of the houses that have come to be called the Houses of the Magdalen for fallen women, to care for them and to offer them the chance to be renewed by the light of Christ that had renewed her. We do not know whether either of these accounts is true, but I can well believe them both, for only by a life of prayer can one be ready for a life of such intense practical charity, ready to offer mercy in the same fashion in which one has received mercy. By experiencing the Man of Sorrows, one can be freed of the fear of death.

Suggested reading: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 988-1019; 1680-1690.

Lady Wisdom
33rd Sunday of the Year—November 17

“A” Readings: Proverbs 31: 10-13,19-20,30-31 • 1 Thes. 5:1-6 • Matt. 25:14-30

Title: The Purpose of Life
Purpose: To show (1) the inequality among people in this world and (2) the equal goal of sanctity for each one of us.

In today’s Gospel Jesus tells a long parable about the men who received different amounts and dealt with them differently. Thereby we see Our Lord entering into Israel’s long tradition of wisdom stories, like the passage from the book of Proverbs that is today’s first reading. In doing so, he teaches a lesson crucial for our salvation: that however great or small our particular resources, the same goal is the same for all of us: real sanctity.

The portion that we read today from chapter 31 of Proverbs is the lovely account of the good wife, and it is important to see this passage not only as the praise of such a good woman but as the end of a long wisdom story that began with the first chapter of that book. The first nine chapters of Proverbs tell the story of an innocent and even somewhat naive young man who comes in from the countryside, not entirely sure of how to make his way in life. In the city he meets a pair of women whom the text calls Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly. Lady Folly promises him a fine time if only he will make a rendezvous with her at sunset near the town gates. Her enticements are alluring to him, and they seem to promise him a life more fascinating than any he could have hoped for.

Lady Wisdom, however, calls her rival’s seductions a path toward death and invites the young man instead to the town square under the bright light of the sun at midday. There he will be able to listen to the traditional wisdom of Israel and grow in the wisdom of making good decisions. The entire middle portion of the book of Proverbs, from chapter 10 to chapter 30, consists of the various collections of proverbs from which the book gets its name. These pithy but profound sayings are sometimes gathered according to subject matter, but at other times seem to be grouped by reason of the sage who uttered them. Often times they come in contrasting pairs, rather like the modern sayings “A stitch in time saves nine” and “Haste makes waste.” Neither one tells a person exactly what to do, but each one indicates a certain line of reasoning that will help one think through a problem. The general theme of the book as a whole is encouragement: if one learns to follow Israel’s traditional wisdom, one can expect to prosper.

For twenty chapters Lady Wisdom is instructing the young man by the consideration of these wisdom sayings. Her textbook will not tell him the answer to any of life’s problems in advance, but it will teach him how to think his way through a problem wisely, including the challenge of finding the right spouse. At the beginning of today’s first reading, then, it says: “When one finds a worthy wife, her value is far beyond pearls. Her husband, entrusting his heart to her, has an unfailing prize. She brings him good, and not evil, all the days of her life.” What then follows is not only praise for this virtuous woman but a fitting conclusion to the wisdom story of the whole book, that the young man faced with the choices of life can learn to choose wisely and that neither his youth nor his poverty nor his inexperience need frustrate him.

The parable that Our Lord tells stresses the difference in the abilities of the three men to whom the various amounts are entrusted. When the master later settles accounts, it is interesting that both the steward who received the largest share and the one who received a more modest sum earn exactly the same praise: “Well done! You are an industrious and reliable servant. Since you were dependable in a small matter, I will put you in charge of larger affairs. Come, share your master’s joy.” Only the man who did nothing with what he received hears his master’s stern criticism and has even the much smaller amount with which he had been entrusted taken away from him before he is pitched out bodily into the darkness to wail and grind his teeth.

Christian interpretation of this wisdom parable has long seen application to the choices each of us must make in life. Our native abilities and the resources at our command because of the time and place where we live or the family into which we are born are sure to differ considerably. Yet the same goal holds for all of us: the sanctity in which we will someday hear the Lord invite us to share his joy forever in heaven. By this interpretation of the parable, it is not a question of whether we have made another five thousand like the first man, or another two thousand like the second, but a question of whether we have used what we have been given. The imagery of the parable comes, of course, from the realm of financial investment and fiduciary responsibility, but the standard interpretation for this passage takes these quantities to represent the whole range of our talents and abilities. From the one to whom much has been given, much will be expected.

Mother Teresa was once asked about her philosophy of formation for her sisters, and she replied with a proverb drawn from this parable: “Ask for little and you will get little.” The charity and selfless generosity that she expected from the Missionaries of Charity invite the Lord’s happy summons: “Come, share your master’s joy!” Now, not everyone is called to that high and demanding vocation. But what each of us is called to is sanctity, so that Our Lord may look with favor upon what we are returning to him from what he has given to us. By this parable he makes it clear that he will not be judging by the raw amount but by our fidelity to his charge.

Suggested reading: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1934-1942.

All will be judged
Christ the King—November 24

“A” Readings: Ezekiel 34:11-12,15-17 • 1 Cor. 15:20-26,28 • Matt. 25:31-46

Title: The Last Judgment
Purpose: To give the Church’s teaching on (1) the Particular and (2) the General Judgment.

For the Feast of Christ the King, at the close of one liturgical year and before beginning a new liturgical year next Sunday with the start of Advent, the Church chooses as the Gospel Our Lord’s own testimony about the general judgment we will all face at the end of time. He explains that the Son of Man, now come in glory and escorted by all of heaven’s angels, will pass judgment from his royal throne. He will separate those assembled into two groups, as a shepherd divides sheep from goats. To those on the right he will present their inheritance, eternal life in the kingdom of God, like the pasture prepared for one’s flock. Those on the left he will drive out, like goats driven into the wilderness, to eternal punishment.

In calling this the General Judgment, the Church is also mindful that each of us can expect a Particular Judgment after our own death. In this judgment, some will be found worthy of Heaven immediately, while those who died without having repented mortal sin will have to face the punishments of Hell. Yet others—and for some of us, this is our great hope!—will need the purifications of Purgatory, but we can nonetheless rejoice that Heaven is someday assured once we have been made worthy to see God by being purged of the stains of our sins. Those in this group have had their sins forgiven but by reason of justice must still undergo some form of punishment and perhaps the remedial work of divine healing.

Today’s Gospel passage, however, foretells the day of the General Judgment when everyone is assembled at the end of time. Our Lord’s standards are clear, and so we can never say that we did not know the criteria by which we are to be judged. He uses the same points for the sheep and for the goats: Did they give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, and shelter to the naked? Did they visit the ill and the imprisoned? In each of these cases, doing it for the least of his brothers meant doing it for Christ himself.

The revelation of these standards of judgment tells us much about the real meaning of charity. It is not just a matter of loving those whom it is easy to love, or being nice to those to whom it is nice to be nice. As human beings we are spontaneously attracted to what is already good, beautiful, and comely, and to respond in kind is a good thing according to our natural inclinations. But we find it much harder to respond to what does not appear to us as good or to what strikes us as ugly or painful to be near. Yet finding the way to pour the goodness into a person or a situation that is not so readily attractive is often closer to real charity.

Like God’s act of creation itself, or like the redemption of the human race by Christ’s suffering and death on the cross, divine charity is a matter of putting the goodness in, whether at the moment of creation when there was nothing yet that was attractive because there was nothing there at all, or at the moment of the redemption when Our Lord suffered for us who were yet sinners before God. So too the charity that Christ tells us that he will use as the standard at the General Judgment is a matter of loving in a fashion that is like divine charity. The demands of charity are not satisfied by somehow honoring Christ while leaving a truly needy neighbor unhelped. Our Lord expects us to see him in them, that is, to see his image and likeness even in those who strike our natural sight as troubled or troublesome.

To find the least of our brothers who are in need, we can travel to the ends of the earth, but we can also find them within our families, in our neighborhoods, and on our usual paths of life. It is always a matter of learning to see what Christ sees and to love in the way that He wants us to love.

Suggested reading: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 668-682; 1716-1729

Reverend Joseph W. Koterski, S. J., earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at St. Louis University and was ordained in 1992. He has taught at the University of S. Thomas in Houston, Tex., and at Loyola College in Baltimore, Md. At present he is an assistant professor of philosophy at Fordham University, Bronx, N.Y., and is the current editor of the International Philosophical Quarterly. His last series of homilies in HPR appeared in May 2001.

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