This year, Sunday, May 11, will be the great Solemnity of Pentecost, and in our secular calendar, will also be Mother’s Day. So we have much to think about and pray about as this day approaches.

There is a connection between Pentecost and Mother’s Day. When the Holy Spirit came upon our Blessed Lady, his divine power enabled her without human intervention to conceive a child within her womb—the Incarnate Word. Saint John says of this child: “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” And centuries earlier, the prophet Isaiah had said, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and his name will be Emmanuel— God with us.”

Our Lady carried the unborn Christ in her womb for nine months, forming his human body which was united with his divine person. Now, we go forward some 33 years. That son of hers has grown to manhood, and has laid the groundwork for his church. He gives to the church its doctrine, its moral code, its sacraments, its officials, and a small nucleus of its membership. This body, the Church, has members and a head, Christ Himself, but as yet no soul. On Pentecost, the soul is sent into the body and the Church begins to live and function, as it will until the end of time. And that soul is the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Blessed Trinity. That little nucleus of the church—about 120 apostles and disciples—were gathered around the Mother of Jesus in the upper room of Jerusalem. As she mothered the newly conceived Christ, so she mothers the body of the Church and prays for the coming of the Spirit to give it life, as the Spirit descended into her to give life to the child within her womb.

The upper room is the matrix: the mothering principle. A group of people went into it after Jesus had ascended into heaven. They waited and prayed for the Spirit. The Spirit came into that room, and transformed that little group of people into the Church. The womb of the Mother of Christ and the upper room, the womb of the Church, are similar and connected. Pentecost is a mothering feast, so it is very appropriate that this year, it happens to fall on the second Sunday of May, which we also celebrate as Mother’s Day.
Please think of these things as we prepare to celebrate Pentecost, one of the most beautiful and important feasts of our Church calendar. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

Note:  Father Brown composed this message some years ago.

This morning, as I read the Vatican New Service daily report, I noticed that when our Holy Father went to the cathedral in the city of Turin in Italy to venerate the famous Shroud of Turin, he entered the church and went first to the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, there to adore Our Lord in the Holy Eucharist. Then, and only then, did he go to the chapel where the Shroud is on display. This gesture of his is very important for our instruction. However popular, however much an object of curiosity or devotion the Shroud might be, it cannot compare with the importance of the Real Presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Sacrament of the altar.

Every once in a while, we hear someone complain about the mistaken devotion and reverence of simple Catholics. They will enter a church, pay no attention to the Blessed Sacrament, but go immediately to some statue or picture or altar which happens to be their favorite object of veneration, and there pray or burn candles, or touch or rub the holy representation they find there. I remember once I went to a very popular shrine in south Texas. Large numbers of people were coming and going, and mostly they were burning candles before an image of Our Lady. I looked everywhere for the tabernacle, without finding it. So I turned to the person next to me and asked where it was. He didn’t know! He hadn’t come there to adore Christ in the Eucharist, but rather to venerate a picture or a statue. That gets pretty close to idolatry.

Let’s make sure that we get our priorities straight. Our Lord Jesus is superior to an image of him or any saint. He is the one who primarily deserves our adoration and worship. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

Note:  Father Brown composed this message some years ago.

A number of thoughts are uppermost in my mind as I come to compose the daily message today. One is that today is the feast of Saint Athanasius, the great father and doctor of the Church and champion of the doctrine of the divinity of Christ way back in the 300s when a heretic priest by the name of Arius was denying that Jesus is God, and was attracting many to his views. Athanasius resisted that error, and for doing so, he was exiled by the civil power no fewer than five times from his legitimate position as bishop of the city of Alexandria in Egypt. His courage and faith prevailed, and today, all Catholic know very well that Our Divine Lord is “true God and true man.”

This morning, I offered Mass for the repose of Father Albert Moraczewski, perhaps the most distinguished member of the southern province of our Dominican Order here in the United States.  From his childhood, he manifested a gift for science and study. He joined our Order, attracted to it by its emphasis on the intellectual life.  Shortly after his ordination, he earned the Ph.D. degree in science from the University of Chicago with a major in pharmacology since he was especially interested in drugs and medications, in their use and in their abuse.  That led him to an interest also in the whole field of biochemistry, biophysics, and bioethics.  For years, the American bishops in their semi-annual meetings have asked him to address them on the latest developments on things like DNA, stem-cell research, cloning, and other aspects of our physical make-up which have moral connections.

Father Albert was the chaplain of this monastery from 1992 to 1994.  He lived in the apartment in which I now live. And in particular, he celebrated Mass each day at the altar in the chapel where I celebrate Mass each day. As I stand in that very spot every morning, I am acutely aware of the men who have preceded me in this position, most of whom I have known personally and liked and admired. Today, as I stood there, I thought: Albert stood here many times to offer the Holy Sacrifice.  Now, please God, he stands in the kingdom of Heaven offering eternal praise and adoration to the God to whom he devoted his long life here on earth.  He was 87.  Just in case he needs prayer, please remember him in yours. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

Note:  Father Brown composed this message some years ago.

Today is May Day, the first day of the month dedicated by Catholic devotion to the Mother of our Divine Lord. Let us try to live this entire month for the honor and glory of God and in loving devotion to the woman he has given to us as our heavenly mother. Today is the commemoration of Saint Joseph the Worker, a very recently established feast and one which has an unusual cause. It was established by Pope Pius XII in 1955—just [58] years ago, which is very recent as far as church history goes. And the reason why he gave to the Christian world this new liturgical celebration is that during the dreadful days of atheistic communism in much of the world, the communists decided to celebrate an international communist labor day, on which they could glorify human labor and totally ignore the fact that without God, we would not exist, nor would there be a world which we could improve by our human intelligence and technology. During the terrible years of 1917 until 1989 when communism held forth in half of our world, there were May Day demonstrations in all communist countries, usually marked by parades of guns and tanks and strutting soldiers and other death-dealing machinery and personnel. To offset that concept of work-without-God, Pope Pius called the attention of the world to the fact that human work is a great blessing by which we can maintain ourselves and our families and improve the world in which we live.

The gospel tells us that Saint Joseph was a carpenter, and it is almost certain that Our Lord, during those approximately thirty years before he began his public life, worked with his guardian, Saint Joseph, in the carpentry trade. I have no doubt that over there in what is now Israel or Palestine, buried under the debris and dust and sand of twenty centuries, there are bits and pieces of tables, chairs, churns, carts, beds, plows, and other artifacts which Saint Joseph and Our Lord made with the primitive tools of their day. Imagine: the same divine intellect which fashioned the human brain and the galaxies which wheel over our heads day and night, made fairly simple furniture which would be improved upon by the cabinet-makers of a future generation.  And the busy hands of Our Lady, which so lovingly held the Incarnate Word in adoring joy and love and prayer, pulled many a bucket of water up from the village well and fashioned many a batch of dough into bread for her little family, one of whom was the Second Person of the Infinite Trinity.

Let us therefore do what we must do in the pursuit of our own vocation and profession as lovingly and as caringly as we can.  Saint Benedict instructed his monks to handle their shovels and spades and pick-axes as prayerfully as they handled the chalices and the patens and other sacred vessels in the chapel, since all of these things contribute to our worship of God. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

Note:  Father Brown composed this message some years ago.

For the second day in a row, we have the joy of celebrating one of our Dominican saints. Yesterday, Saint Catherine of Siena; today Pope Saint Pius V. He was an Italian who was elected because he was known to be very much in favor of the reforms mandated by the Council of Trent. He reigned as pope for only six years, but accomplished a great deal during that brief pontificate. In 1571, the Muslims were trying to invade Europe from the east, having failed to do so centuries earlier through the west. They assembled a great fleet of ships from their Ottoman empire in what is now Turkey, and came sailing around Greece, hoping to invade the Italian peninsula. Pope Saint Pius knew this. Because he had great devotion to Our Blessed Mother, and especially to the Rosary, he asked the people of Rome—and wherever else his request reached—to pray the Rosary for the protection of Christendom from the infidel. A Christian fleet went out to meet the Muslim fleet; they met and fought off the Greek coast, near a place called Lepanto. The Muslim fleet was destroyed, and Europe was saved. The naval engagement took place on October 7th; for that reason, the Pope decreed that that date should be celebrated as a feast of Our Lady of Victory, Our Lady of the Rosary.

Then, as if by way of a follow-up to that event, over three hundred years later—in 1917 in Portugal, the Mother of our Lord appeared to three shepherd children at a place called Fatima. That was the year of the Russian revolution, when the great nation of Russia and all its dependencies stretching eastward toward the Pacific Ocean suffered the horror of having atheistic, materialistic communism imposed upon it by people like Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky.  It was the beginning of seventy years of misery and irreligion.  The Holy Virgin, concerned about this tragic turn of events, asked the world through those three children at Fatima to pray the Rosary for the conversion of Russia, and identified herself as “the Lady of the Rosary.”

It is not by accident that Our Lady appeared at Fatima. The name is that of one of Mohammed’s daughters, and thus the mother of Jesus associates herself with a Mohammedan, Muslim, name.  Jesus, and she, are mentioned with respect in the Koran, the holy book of Islam, but in a position inferior to that of “the Prophet, Mohammed.”

So here we have Saint Pius V asking that the Rosary be said for the defeat of Islam, and Our Blessed Mother taking upon herself the name of a Muslim woman while at the same time saying, “I am the Lady of the Rosary.”

It is time for us to start a great crusade of prayer—and of the Rosary in particular—for the conversion of Islam. There are millions of people in this world who follow Islam and therefore deny the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  On the infamous “9/11” some of their radical extremists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York and into the Pentagon in Washington, killing more than three thousand people, believing that they were giving glory to Allah, their name for God.  The only real champion we have to aid us in our combat with this kind of fanaticism is the gentle Mother of Christ whose immaculate heart loves even the most hate-filled of human beings, since she became their mother when her divine Son gave his life on the cross for their redemption. Let us listen to the official prayer of the Church on Good Friday for the conversion of the infidel:  Almighty and eternal God, enable those who do not acknowledge Christ to find the truth as they walk before you in sincerity of heart. Help us to grow in love for one another, to grasp more fully the mystery of your godhead, and to become more perfect witnesses of your love in the sight of men. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

Note:  Father Brown composed this message some years ago.

 

Today we Dominicans and many others throughout the world celebrate with special pride and joy the feast of our Sister, Saint Catherine of Siena. Only three women have been declared Doctors of the Church, and she was the earliest one to be so honored. The life of this remarkable woman was very closely associated with the Popes. When she was a little girl of only six, Our Lord appeared to her. In her vision, she saw Christ dressed in the vestments of the Pope, and enthroned among saints and angels in heaven. The beauty of the vision gave her a tremendous awareness of the connection of Our Savior and his vicar on earth, the Pope. This was the means chosen by Our Lord to correct a major problem in the Church. About forty years before Catherine’s birth, the Pope, under the influence of French cardinals and politicians, had left Rome and gone to live in Avignon, a French city on the Rhone river in what is now southern France. He and his successors remained in Avignon for seventy years, much to the scandal and demoralization of the Church and its people of the time. This Italian girl, in her twenties, moved by the Holy Spirit, exerted such influence upon the Pope that he finally gave in to her begging, pleading, threatening, and scolding, and returned to Rome where he belonged and where the Popes have continued to reside ever since, as they had since the time of Saint Peter. The Pope is the Bishop of Rome.

If ever there was a saint who was grateful to Our Lord for his establishment of the papacy, and devoted to the current occupant on the seat of Peter, it was Catherine of Siena.  The two principal criteria by which a Catholic can be identified are these: that he or she believe in, and worthily receive, the Holy Eucharist regularly, and that he or she be in communion with and obedient to the Pope, the Bishop of Rome.  We here in America have come to believe that our democratic form of government gives us the right to criticize our political leaders, to lampoon and ridicule them, and to disobey them whenever we can get away with it.  That immature and irresponsible mentality cannot be carried over into the Church.  We do not elect our Popes; the Church is by no means a democracy.  It teaches and governs by divine authority.  And Christ said to Saint Peter, the first Pope, “Whatsoever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; whatsoever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”   That total authority has been passed down from Peter to all his successors, of whom [Pope Francis] is the [265^th]. I do not necessarily agree with everything that every pope has done; we all know that some of our popes were not good men and were scandalous pontiffs.  But they never erred in matters of faith or morals.  On the other hand, in the last two centuries, the Church and the world have been blessed with some of the finest popes in the history of Christendom, the incumbent one certainly included.

If we want to be the Catholics we ought to be, let us ask Saint Catherine of Siena to help us in that very noble aspiration.  “He who hears you, hears Me,” Jesus said to the apostles and their successors.  And to Saint Peter, “Feed my lambs . . . feed my sheep.”  Let us accept the “feeding” of our Popes for in doing so, we are nourished by Christ Our Lord himself.  Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

Note:  Father Brown composed this message some years ago.

Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Mark, the author of the second Gospel and a disciple of Saint Peter. Scripture scholars tell us that when we read the gospel according to Saint Mark, we are really reading the preaching of Saint Peter, which Mark heard time and again and eventually wrote down to preserve for posterity.

Saint Mark is thought to be buried under the main altar of the basilica of Saint Mark in Venice.  He probably died in the city of Alexandria in the Nile delta of Egypt.  When Islam was founded and spread across all of North Africa, many of the most sacred objects and relics in that part of the world were brought to the Catholic cities north of the Mediterranean to preserve them from desecration at the hands of the Muslims.  Thus Saint Mark’s body was brought to Venice and became the most precious treasure of that city. Even before that, the four animals which are mentioned in the Book of Revelation were held to be symbolic of the writers of the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  The four animals were the man, the lion, the ox, and the eagle. These were seen as the four living things which were the wisest, the noblest, the strongest, and the swiftest. Thus the lion has been associated with Saint Mark and Saint Mark’s city, Venice, for centuries.  

I hope that you have visited the charming city of Venice or will do so some day.  Built on a series of islands in a lagoon at the northeastern end of the Adriatic Sea, it has canals where other cities have streets.  The islands are joined by bridges which gracefully arch over the canals high enough to permit gondolas and other kinds of boats to pass underneath them.  Everywhere you see the sign of the lion, and the very heart of the city is the large Piazza San Marco—Saint Mark Square—providing a beautiful setting for the basilica of Saint Mark and its very tall bell tower from the top of which can be seen wonderful views of the city, its waterways, piazzas, and bridges.  In very recent church history, three of the archbishops of Venice (they are traditionally called “patriarchs”) have been elected to the papacy.  They have been Saint Pius X, Blessed John XXIII, and Pope John Paul I.  

A few years ago, when I was pastor of Holy Rosary Parish in Houston, a family of my parishioners brought to me a white marble plaque depicting the Lion of Saint Mark.  I am very fond of it and hung it over the door of the church leading to the priory.  Whenever I see that plaque which probably came from Venice, I am grateful to those who brought it to our parish.  Today, on the feast of Saint Mark, I will go there to look at it again and pray to Saint Mark for those who brought me that very nice souvenir.  Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you.  Father Victor Brown, O.P.

Note:  Father Brown composed this message some years ago.

“I love you.” Those “three little words,” as they have been called, are among the most beautiful in any language, and certainly have caused more joy down the centuries of human life than any other statements ever made. And in the gospel of today’s Mass, Our Divine Lord tells his apostles at the Last Supper, and tells us here and now, “I love you.” And then he goes on to say, “Remain in my love.” We could spend a lifetime meditating on this directive: remain in my love. The most perfect form of love is reciprocal love, when two persons love one another, when the powerful and wonderful current of love flows both ways. The young mother loves her newborn baby, but the baby cannot love in return right away. It takes several years for the human being to be able to love. And then there is the acute suffering caused when someone loves someone else, but the love in unrequited. This is why the sin of adultery, unfaithfulness in marriage, is so tragic and painful, and so offensive in the sight of God.

But Our Lord goes on to tell us that if we keep his commandments, we will remain in his love. And then he adds, “I told you this so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete.” Down through the centuries of human existence, individuals and societies have spent a great deal of time and effort thinking, speaking, and writing about whether there is a God, what kind of God he might be, and how we can appropriately relate to God. We Christians have the tremendous advantage of knowing that God is Love, that God loves us, and that God asks us to keep his commandments. That, and our knowledge of his love for us, will make us happy in this world and infinitely so in the next.

The word “gospel” means “good news.” So as we approach the readings of today’s Mass, we have the best of all good news. We hear Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God saying to his apostles and to us, both individually and collectively, “I love you.” Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

Note:  Father Brown composed this message some years ago. 

Do you ever feel frustrated? Do you ever find yourself thinking or saying, “If only I could do this, or had that, or didn’t have to be burdened with thus and such?” If you haven’t had experiences like that, you are in the very small minority, because most of us from time to time feel frustrated and hampered by either the presence of some problem in our lives or the absence of some advantage.In today’s gospel, Our Lord tells us that he is the vine and we are the branches. He goes on to say that our heavenly Father is the vinedresser who prunes the vine to make it bear more fruit. Now, from the viewpoint of the vine, pruning is a form of frustration. The natural tendency of the plant is to put forth more tendrils, more branches, more leaves. But the human vine-grower is not interested in tendrils, branches, and leaves. He wants grapes! Thus, the need to prune. And so with us and God. Our tendency is toward self-expression, pleasure, the ability to manipulate our world to our own liking. But that is not God’s desire, because if every human being were allowed to follow his and her own tendency, there would be constant conflict in the world—more so than there already is. So, God prunes us, and we don’t always like it.

I think of the late Pope, John Paul II. When he was elected to the Chair of Saint Peter in 1978, he was vibrant, healthy man of 58. By the time of his death at the age of 84, he was a terribly debilitated man—having suffered the ravages of disease for years, having been shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin, and having fallen and broken bones several times because of the Parkinson’s disease which slowly invaded his entire body and deprived him of more and more of his natural ability. During the recent visit of Pope Benedict to our country, some film clips were shown on television taken during the last days of Pope John Paul II. He came to his window to address the crowd in the square below, and was not able to utter a sound. His voice totally failed him. Can you imagine the frustration—knowing how much there was to be done, and eager to do it, and yet unable to perform his tasks as he saw them because of the totally worn-out condition of his body?

When we find ourselves fretting and complaining because we can’t do as we would like, or must carry a cross which we would like to get rid of, let us be aware that God is pruning us and let us offer to him “the pruning,” by which he imposes his holy will upon us and thus accomplishes his purposes far better than we could achieve them. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

Note:  Father Brown composed this message some years ago.

I like history and find it endlessly fascinating. Today, for example, is the [107th] anniversary of the great San Francisco earthquake. In the mid-30s, when I was a child, Hollywood made the movie “San Francisco” with Jeannette MacDonald, Spencer Tracy, and Clark Gable, and a ten- or fifteen-minute sequence of the earthquake which won a special award for realism. The movie made a great impression on me, so when I spent many happy hours and days there in the navy, I visited a number of places and things connected with the quake. I remember being taken down into the foundations of the church of Old Saint Mary’s in Chinatown by the sacristan, so that I could see the split in the natural bedrock there and the repairs to the foundations of the church that had to be made before rebuilding the structure above.

I speak of history because today, while watching the activities of our Holy Father in New York, I heard one of the anchormen or announcers point out that Benedict XVI is the first German pope we’ve had in over a thousand years. If I were not a Catholic and heard that statement, I would find it astounding, and would certainly look up the history of the popes, find out who the last previous German pope was, and then trace the papacy back to its beginning. And then, I think, I would be so impressed by that marvelous history that I would be moved to examine the Catholic Church seriously and then, I imagine, to become a member of it.

 

Unfortunately, most people tend to be superficial. The fact that Benedict XVI is the 264th successor of Saint Peter, the first pope, is unknown to many, and unimportant and insignificant to many others. But I have no doubt that in various parts of our nation and the world, there are people who watch and listen to our Holy Father during this pastoral visit to our country, and think seriously about the man and his mission. And that meditation will lead some of them to become members of his flock, the Roman Catholic Church. God grant that these may be many, and that they will find what their hearts have been hungering for, perhaps for years. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

 

Note:  Father Brown composed this message some years ago.