CDM for the Feast of Saint Maria Goretti (6 July 2009)I am composing this message on Sunday, July 5, and will record it on the telephone and by e-mail because on the morning of Monday, July 6th, I won’t have time to do that. I leave with friends for the airport to fly to Bozeman, Montana, from where we begin our vacation to Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Tetons, Glacier National Park, and then up to Banff Springs and Lake Louise in the province of Alberta, Canada. I have never been to that part of the world and everyone tells me what a beautiful treat I am in for. I’m looking forward to it! There is a very close connection between beauty and prayer, and I’m sure that many of the things we see on our trip will lead us to admiration and the joy of being in the presence of natural beauty on a grand scale, and then that will lead us to praise the Creator of those beautiful scenes.

While we are away, we will celebrate the commemoration day of Saint Benedict on July 11th and Our Lady of Mount Carmel on July 16th. I mention those two feasts because they are among my favorites. Saint Benedict is the founding father of the monastic life in the western world, and thus in a sense, he is the spiritual father of all of us monks and nuns and friars and religious from about the year 500 down to the present. If you want to read a spiritual classic that breathes an atmosphere of peace and religious tranquillity, read the Rule of Saint Benedict. It has formed religious life for these fifteen centuries, and will continue doing so, I hope, for centuries into the future. The friends with whom I will be traveling were with me some years ago when we went to Monte Cassino, between Rome and Naples in Italy. It is there that Saint Benedict spent the last and most influential years of his life, and where he and his sister, Saint Scholastica, are buried together under the main altar of the abbey church. We were able to celebrate Mass there, and will no doubt be remembering that moment when we celebrate him again this year.

Then, five days later we will celebrate Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the title of Our Blessed Mother by which the Carmelites of the world venerate her. Actually, the Church is passing through a sort of golden age of Carmelite spirituality right now, beginning just about 125 years ago when Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus—”the Little Flower,” as we call her—entered the Carmelite monastery in her home town of Lisieux in northwestern France. She lived there only nine years but in that short period, achieved tremendous sanctity which has caused the Church to canonize her soon after her death, and to declare her a Doctor of the Church.

At that same period, another young Carmelite nun in France, but in the city of Dijon, was achieving sanctity. Her name was Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity. She has already been beatified, and will probably be canonized before long.

Then, during the period of World War II, a German Jewish professor of philosophy by the name of Edith Stein was led into the Church and into the Carmelite cloistered life by reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila, the foundress of the Carmelite reform movement in Spain during the 16th century. She died in the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1942, offering her life in reparation for the Holocaust. And in that same period, the Carmelite priest from Holland, Father Titus Brandsma, died rather than discontinue his religious teachings and writings as the Nazis demanded that he do. All of these outstanding Carmelites make this a special time in the history of the Carmelites, and we will be celebrating this on July 16th. These messages will resume on July 20. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

There are a number of things to think and pray about as we come to this weekend. One of them is that July 3rd is the annual feast of Saint Thomas, the apostle who doubted the word of his fellow apostles that they had seen the risen Lord. He insisted upon seeing Jesus himself, and furthermore of touching the nail wounds in Our Lord’s hands and putting his hand into the lance-wound in Our Lord’s side. Then, having satisfied his own incredulity, he exclaimed in joy and adoration, “My Lord and my God!”

This Friday is also the first Friday of the new month of July, a day always associated with our devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as He himself requested of Saint Margaret Mary and through her, of the entire Catholic world. If Saint Thomas did, in fact actually insert his hand into the wound of Our Lord’s side, he would have come into very close physical contact with the Heart of Christ. Thus there is a connection between Saint Thomas the Apostle and the first Friday of the month when his feast occasionally falls.

Then, Saturday of this weekend is our national Independence Day, or the “Fourth of July” as it’s more often called. Two hundred and thirty-three years ago—on July 4, 1776—the members of the Continental Congress of the American colonies, representing their individual colonies, adopted and signed the Declaration of Independence, and thus brought a new nation into existence. We know what a momentous event that was, and what an effect it has had on our lives both corporately and individually. What a blessing is our American citizenship and all the benefits and freedoms and rights and privileges that go with it!

Recently, the then-Prime Minister of England, Mr. Tony Blair, made a very accurate comment about the success of a nation. He said we can tell whether a nation is a successful one by noticing how many people want to become its citizens and residents, and how many want to leave it. These facts speak for themselves: the United States of America is a very successful nation, despite its problems. And we as religious people owe our Heavenly Father a great debt of gratitude for our membership in this nation whose birthday we celebrate this Saturday, and we owe to our fellow citizens, and especially those in public office and service, our prayers and support. God HAS blessed America; let us pray that He will continue to do so in the years ahead. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

The very first of the psalms contrasts the good man with the wicked one, and says that the good man is like a tree planted by streams of water. In an arid part of the world like Israel in which the psalms were composed, it is very evident that water in crucial for life, growth, prosperity—both for plants, animals, and human beings. Thus time and again, there are biblical references to water and its life-giving effects. While thinking of this, you might find it very helpful to read the fourth chapter of the gospel of Saint John, in which Jesus speaks to the Samaritan woman at the well.He speaks of giving her “living water.” And goes on to say, “Anyone who drinks the water that I shall give will never be thirsty again.”

Let us think of a life of virtue and goodness as similar to the life of a tree whose roots draw good, fresh water into its organism. And our relationship with Our Divine Lord as symbolized by our drinking the “living water” which he wants to give us to slake our thirst in time and in eternity. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

 Our last two Popes, namely John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have taken very seriously their obligation to teach the Church and the world. For that reason, they embarked upon a campaign of explaining the thought and writings of our church fathers and doctors to help those of us in this century to penetrate the minds and hearts of those men who were so imbued with the Spirit of Our Lord Jesus Christ early on in the history of the Christian community in this world. They lived and taught, and in many cases, died by martyrdom in what is now Israel or Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and Iran, and then throughout the Roman Empire: Italy, Spain, the Germanic lands north of the Danube, France, and the entire northern coast of Africa, from Morocco in the west to Egypt in the east. So if you look back over the talks given by our Supreme Pontiffs in the past thirty years, you will hear a lot about Saints Jerome, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa, Hilary of Poitiers, Ignatius of Antioch, Anthony of Egypt, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and many others to whom the Christian community is deeply indebted for our knowledge of divine revelation.You might be aware that the Jewish people divided their bible, which is our Old Testament, into three sections: the Law, the Writings, and the Prophets. We do it somewhat differently; we speak of the Historical Books, which contain the Law or the Torah and the other historical books describing the history of the Jewish people before the time of Christ; then the Wisdom Literature which contains most especially the Book of Psalms, which has served as the prayerbook of Jew and Christian alike from long before the time of Our Lord, and then finally the Prophets: the four major writing prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and the twelve minor writing prophets who are of lesser importance in describing the Messiah, the Savior who was to come.

I would like to take a cue from Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI and devote my Catholic Daily Message to passages from the book of Psalms, or the Psalter as it is often called. There are 150 psalms in the psalter, some as short as two lines; others as long as several pages. They have been used by Jews and Christians of many different churches and divisions to express prayer and worship of God. We Catholics cannot go to Mass without praying parts of the psalms; the Mass is shot through with them, and they are especially to be found after the first reading in the Liturgy of the Word which is followed by what we call the “responsorial psalm” because it is a sort of meditation on the reading that was proclaimed just before it.

That is enough for today; tomorrow we will begin to examine particular passages from the book of psalms which have shaped and formed the spiritual lives of millions, including Our Divine Lord and His Immaculate Mother down through sacred history. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

We come to the end of the month of June, and therefore of the first half of this year of Our Lord, 2009. Our Holy Father Pope Benedict has brought the Year of Saint Paul to an end with the solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, and the universal Church continues to benefit from the ministry of the Pope, the successor of Saint Peter.Yesterday I began to read a short book in which the author gathers a number of quotations and selections from the writings of Dorothy Day, a woman who was born in 1897 and died in 1980. She was a remarkably wise Christian and Catholic, and may one day be a canonized saint. Cardinal O’Connor of New York City has already set into motion the process by which that might some day take place.

Dorothy Day was always concerned with the poor and the means for helping them. She was one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement which has done excellent work in our country—and abroad, too, I think—in addressing the needs of the poor and the causes of poverty within a wealthy country like ours. And while she was still a young woman, she believed in, for a short time, the errors of Communism propagated by Karl Marx and the governments of the Soviet Union. But she soon came to understand that there can be no human values, no ultimate benefit to the human being without love. And there can be no love without God. It is interesting and very important that in our own time, we have seen the wonderful effects of people like Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Cesar Chavez, the organizer of Mexican migrant workers. They shared with theoretical Communism a concern for the poor and a desire to help them. But then, they differed from Communism in seeing that all goodness comes ultimately from God, and that the perfect model for all social improvement is Our Lord Jesus Christ, and not Karl Marx or Lenin or Fidel Castro or Mao Tse Tung—people whose hands are red with blood because of the wars and upheavals that their attempts to solve human needs have generated.

Our Lord’s hands were red with blood when he died, too. But it was his own blood which he gladly shed for our benefit and salvation, not that of others. If authentic benefit is ever to be conferred upon humanity, it must be through generosity, not violent revolution; giving, not inflicting; suffering, not persecuting; Communism has given rise to the gulags—the terrible prisons within the Communist empire. Naziism gave rise to the death camps like Auschwitz and the horrors of the Holocaust. Christianity, on the other hand, has given rise to the monastic life with its monasteries and convents throughout the world, to hospitals, schools, and to people like Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa, and John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

Today, June 29th, is the solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, one of the greatest celebrations in the annual calendar of the Church and in some countries, a holyday of obligation. This year it is the end of the Year of Saint Paul proclaimed by our holy father, Pope Benedict XVI. And as the Year of Saint Paul ends, the Year of the Priest which began week before last, on the solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, gets underway.When Our Lord asked the apostles who people said He was, they said this or that, and then He asked them, “But who do YOU say that I am?” Saint Peter spoke up: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” That meant “You are the Anointed One, the promised redeemer, who shares in the nature of God just as every son shares in the nature of his father.” Our Lord was very pleased with this answer since it was profoundly true, and he commended Saint Peter on it.

When I was a child in grade school, the Sisters who taught us encouraged us to use those words of Saint Peter which had been so commended by Jesus every time we were at Mass and the priest elevated the Sacred Host after consecrating it. So, all through these years since then, either as a layman or a priest, at the moment of the elevation of the Host, I have looked at it and said what the Sisters taught me to say, and what St. Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

Every year on the solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, the pope confers upon those men who have become archbishops in the previous year the pallium—a strip of cloth which is worn over the shoulders and hangs down front and back, symbolizing the dignity of archbishop. Today, two men whom I know received it from the hands of the Holy Father: Archbishop Michael Miller, the archbishop of Vancouver in Canada, his native country; and Archbishop Gregory Aymond, the new Archbishop of New Orleans, and the first native-born New Orleanian ever to shepherd that archdiocese. Archbishop Miller is a member of the Basilian congregation of priests, and was stationed at the University of Saint Thomas just a few blocks down the street from us here in Houston before returning to his native Canada and becoming the archbishop of Vancouver.

Saint Peter was, as we know, the first Pope. Pope Benedict XVI is his successor in that supreme position within the Church. And while Saint Peter and the other eleven apostles were first preaching to the Jewish people as Christ had commanded them, Saint Paul was very dramatically converted from persecutor to preacher and sent to bring the gospel to the Gentiles. These two men were very different in background and personality, but alike in their devotion to Our Lord Jesus Christ. And they met the same end: death by martyrdom at the hands of the pagan emperors of Rome. So we celebrate them today and give thanks for Our Lord’s foundation of the Church upon their faith, their courage, and their love of Him and those he wished to bring into His Church through their apostolate. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

I would like to call to your attention the second reading for the Mass of this Sunday, taken from Saint Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. It seems to me that it doesn’t receive the attention that it deserves. Saint Paul is concerned about the poverty of his fellow-Christians in Jerusalem, and so he is taking up a collection among the Christians in Corinth to help the Jerusalem group. To encourage the Corinthians to be generous, he reminds them, “Our Lord Jesus Christ, though he was rich, for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” He goes on to say that “at the present time you should supply their needs, so that THEIR ABUNDANCE may also supply your needs . . .”Now, what is this abundance among the Jerusalem Christians that Saint Paul refers to and which counterbalances the abundance of the Corinthians? It is the very poverty of the members of the Jerusalem community. In the mind of Saint Paul, poverty can be a form of abundance because it gives those who are more affluent the opportunity to practice charity to the needy. If there were no poor on earth, we could not practice generosity. If there were no sick or suffering, we could not practice healing or mercy or compassion. If no one offended us, we could not practice forgiveness, which is very important since Jesus teaches us to pray: “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive. . .” That is why the saints have welcomed opportunities to forgive, to be charitable, to be concerned, compassionate, to do what they could to heal, to do good.

Years ago there was in the Poor Clare monastery of Jerusalem a sick and elderly nun who required much attention from her Sisters, and it was not a numerous community. Our Lord used to appear to her and speak to her, and one day she asked him either to cure her or to take her to Himself in death since she was such a burden to her sisters. His answer was “No. Your needs bring out the best in your sisters and give them the opportunity to exercise charity and mercy. This is the greatest gift that I can give to your community to help them grow in holiness. And so, you will remain alive and ill, and thus serve Me and your sisters.”

We need to think of this regularly. Whether we ourselves are needy and require service, or whether we are responsible for the needs and requirements of someone near to us, let us try to see the neediness as “an abundance” as Saint Paul calls it, and realize the goodness of God in giving these needs and the opportunities to minister to them. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

In the first readings of our Masses during these few days, we hear the story of the early patriarchs—the fathers of the Jewish people and of all salvation history. God chose Abraham from what is now Iraq and led him to what is now Israel or the Holy Land. Abraham was the first Jew, the father of the chosen people, and our spiritual father, since Abraham’s progeny included Our Divine Lord and we are all spiritually descended from Christ.

Then we come to the delightful story of Abraham’s son, Isaac. Abraham’s legitimate wife, Sarah, had no children; this childlessness was a source of sorrow to Abraham and Sarah. God was, of course, aware of this, and he promised Abraham that he and his wife would conceive and bear a son. When Abraham heard this, he laughed at the idea of his wife becoming a mother at the age of 90 and he a father at 100. This concept of Abraham’s laughter is important here, because the name “Isaac” means “laughter” in the Hebrew language.

As the story continues, God appears to Abraham in the form of three men (this is in Genesis, chapter 18.) They tell Abraham that when they return at the same time next year, his wife Sarah, who is inside the tent preparing a meal for their guests, will be a mother. Sarah can hear through the tentcloth what is being said outside, and she laughs at the idea. Here we find the idea of laughter again. When the three men hear her laughing, they ask Abraham why she is laughing and why does she not believe the prediction of these men. Afraid to offend them—and perhaps also afraid that her incredulity will annul their prediction, Sarah comes outside the tent and lies to the guests: “I did not laugh,” she says. But they say to her, “Yes, you did laugh!”

The prediction came to pass. Sarah, even at her great age, conceived and gave birth to a male child. When he was born, Abraham gave him the name “Isaac,” and Sarah said “God has given me cause to laugh; all those who hear of it will laugh with me.”

All of that happened about 3800 years ago, and the laughter of Abraham and Sarah is still filling the world with joy because they had the son Isaac, who became the father of Jacob, later called “Israel.” From these three men—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob or Israel, and their wives—came the Jewish nation, and, in time, Christ the Savior of the world. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

This is a very unusual feast in the annals of church worship; it is, as we said yesterday, one of the only three birthdays which the Church celebrates in her yearly cycle of celebrations. And that is because we know of only three persons who were BORN in the state of sanctifying grace. They are Our Lord, His Blessed Mother, and Saint John the Baptist. Christ is always and totally without sin and “full of grace” because He is God, the second person of the Holy Trinity. His immaculate mother was conceived totally without sin and “full of grace,” as the archangel greeted her at the moment of the annunciation. And Saint John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit while still in the womb of his mother who had conceived him far after the normal time of childbearing. Our Lady went to visit her pregnant cousin Saint Elizabeth to assist her in her preparations for the birth of this miraculous child. When the two women met and embraced, the two unborn children in their wombs, namely John the Baptist and Jesus Our Lord, were pressed close together. The unborn John, six months farther along than Jesus, leaped with joy when he sensed the presence of the Savior very close by. Thus, even in the womb, John becomes the forerunner, the prophet who announces to the world the coming of the Redeemer promised many centuries before.Another interesting element of this feast of the birth of Saint John the Baptist is that it occurs on June 24, just three days after the longest day of the year and thus as the days begin to grow shorter again. We really don’t know when either John or Jesus was conceived or born. So early in church history, when the sacred calendar was being structured, the church fathers decided to take as a sort of clue the words of John the Baptist when he was grown and introducing Christ to the world. John said of Our Lord, “He must increase; I must decrease.” So the calendar-makers placed the celebration of the birth of Saint John at that time of the year when the days begin to grow shorter, and that of Jesus when they begin to grow longer, four days after the winter solstice. Thus we have the birth of John on June 24th and that of Jesus, six months later, on December 25th.

Finally, let us reflect on the words of Jesus where He says that John is the greatest ever born of woman, and yet the least in the kingdom is greater than John. What he means there is that John had the tremendous privilege of actually introducing the promised Savior to the world, thus the greatest of the Old Testament figures. But John was not given the privilege of becoming a Christian in the full sense of the term. He did not receive any of the sacraments, even though he baptized Jesus by a non-sacramental rite. Nor did he receive the Sacrament of Holy Orders to become a priest and celebrate Mass, nor did he receive the body and blood of Our Divine Lord in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. In this sense, the least in the kingdom of Christianity is greater than John, and we should often reflect upon these immense privileges that our position as members of the Church of Our Divine Lord confers upon us. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

The visit of my former classmate last week and our spending several days in Galveston caused me to forget completely that this past Sunday was the summer solstice—the longest day of the year, and the official beginning of summer. The four days by which our four seasons begin are the summer and winter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes. And they fall on the 21st of the months of March, June, September, and December, give or take a day.

We recognize that our lives are divided into time periods: days, weeks, months, years, and the natural seasons. And since “time is the stuff life is made of,” as Thomas Jefferson once remarked, it is important to us, not only in terms of this life but also of our spiritual journey through this world into eternity. So, Sunday, June 21, was the beginning of our official summer, even though we who live in places like south Texas will experience summer weather long after the 21st of September, when summer officially ends.

So here we are, at the beginning of summer, and approaching the end of the month of June. The church calendar is studded with beautiful feasts: the Body and Blood of Christ, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and tomorrow the birth of Saint John the Baptist—one of the only three births that are celebrated in the calendar of our worship. The other feasts mark the holy deaths rather than the births of the saints. We will see more of that tomorrow.

Our summer, like all our seasons, lasts three months—approximately ninety days. It presents to us that period of time to live in union with God, in the state of grace, as we call it. It allows us to attend Mass daily, to receive Holy Communion, to pray, to treat others as we would want them to treat us, as Our Lord commands us in the gospel reading of today’s Mass, to offer our “prayers, works, joys, and sufferings” of each day to the glory of God. How shall we spend this summer relative to our friendship with Our Lord Jesus Christ? Will we make good use of this time—these ninety days, these three months, this season? It is a gift, an opportunity. Will we be alive at the end of it? We have no idea, but the important thing is that whether we are alive or not, we be in the state of grace, in the state of friendship with our Savior. Let us do our best to live in that attitude, with that goal in mind. Like faithful husbands and wives, let us do our best to be very much in love with Him to whom we have been committed by our Baptism, our Confirmation, our holy faith. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.