When I approached my computer this morning to do the daily message, I noticed in the  news headlines that flash on the screen of my monitor a piece about the famous young golfer, Tiger Woods, who was recently involved in an automobile accident about which he will not speak to the press.

 The reporting of this incident by the media is morally pathetic. Some are conjecturing, as usual, that he isn’t talking because there was some touch of scandal involved—another woman, an affair, etc. In the world of the media, it’s the stuff that money is made of because of the prurient interest of millions of people.  And one of the reporters is saying that Tiger has been so “boring” until now, when this incident adds some interest to his ho-hum life of golf expertise. If they can’t find any evidence of scandal, adultery, a family quarrel, etc., then Tiger will have to go back to being “boring.”

 How sad it is when people who keep the moral law and behave according to ethical principles—even those who are at the top of their professional fields—are judged to be “boring” because they don’t give the gossip-mongers and especially the scandal-lovers something to amuse themselves with! I have no idea about the details of Tiger Woods’s private life. But I am saddened by the idea that living innocently and respectably is “boring.” That would make most of the saints very boring indeed, and the Virgin Mother of Jesus supremely boring. Our Lord was not boring because he worked miracles. But Our Lady is not reported as having performed any extraordinary works during her life on earth, and would therefore be judged as boring because the breath of scandal did not touch her. I certainly hope that, from this perverted moral point of view, you and I can be judged as boring. It gives us much to think about and to pray about in the world in which we live.  Thank you for seeking God’s truth.  God bless you.  Father Victor Brown, O.P.

We are now at the beginning. The beginning of three things, all connected and all associated with our relationship with Our Lord Jesus Christ. We are at the beginning of the church year, of the holy season of Advent, and of the month of December.

Yesterday, the first weekday of Advent, was the feast of Saint Andrew, so we had to use the readings proper to that feast and could not get into the beautiful Advent texts which are so familiar, so classic in our religious literature. But today is an Advent weekday, and as we come to celebrate Mass or read the biblical passages assigned for today, we find this: “On that day, a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse and from his roots a bud shall blossom. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him . . .”

The gifts of that Spirit which will come upon the Savior are then listed, and then all sorts of indications are given about the peace and harmony which will prevail in the kingdom of the coming Messiah: “The wolf shall be the guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the baby goat with a little child to lead them . . . ” Peace, harmony, gentleness, safety¢—these and many other beautiful concepts will reign in the kingdom of God which is ushered in by the coming of Jesus our Redeemer. All these realities are contained in the idea of Advent, of the coming of the Incarnate Word at Christmas, and of the notion of Our Divine Lord as the Prince of Peace.

About 1000 years before the time of Christ, there was a farmer in Bethlehem named Jesse. He had seven sons, the youngest of whom was David. The prophet Samuel was directed by God to anoint David as the future king of the nation, God’s people. From the family of David there sprang Mary and Joseph, and so Jesus, our Lord. This is why the names of Jesse and David are mentioned so often in our Advent and Christmas liturgies.

And in the gospel of today’s Mass, Our Lord says to his disciples: “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see . . . Many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it.” We have seen the birth of the Savior in our Sacred History, and we have see Him every time we attend Mass and receive the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, that bread which is foretold by the fact that the name Bethlehem means “house of bread.” Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

It would be good if every Christian were able to name the twelve apostles of Our Lord. It might help to remember that in the original group called by Jesus, there were two Simons, two Jameses, and two Judes or Judases. One of the Simons had his name changed by Jesus to Peter and became the first Pope; the two James are sometimes distinguished as James the Greater and James the Less; and then, when Judas Iscariot betrayed Our Lord and then committed suicide, the other eleven chose another to replace him: Matthias. This should help us remember the twelve. The other six are Andrew, Bartholomew (sometimes called Nathaniel), John, Matthew, Philip, and Thomas. Saint Andrew was the brother of Simon Peter, and John was the brother of James the Greater.

Another interesting fact that we might reflect upon today is the quotation from the Old Testament in the first reading of today’s Mass. Because the apostles were essentially preachers of the gospel, we read, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news!” The “good news” to which reference is made means the gospel of Christ. And the Old Testament quotation is an earthy one, indicating that even THE FEET of the bringers of that good news are beautiful! In those days, people often went barefooted or wore only sandals. As a result their feet were often dusty, dirty, and the skin of the feet was not particularly attractive. It was a common courtesy for a host to wash his guest’s feet, or have a servant do so, when the guest arrived in his home. But here, because of the immense value and importance of those who brought the Divine Word of revelation, even his FEET were considered beautiful and worthy of honor! So today, as we celebrate Saint Andrew, the fisherman turned preacher, apostle, bishop, martyr, and saint, we smile as we make our own the Biblical idea that because of the importance of his vocation, even his FEET are beautiful! Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

 On Friday of this Thanksgiving weekend, we have a beautiful reading in the Office of Readings in our Liturgy of the Hours. It comes from the pen of Saint Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage in North Africa, who was martyred for our holy faith in the year 258.

 Saint Cyprian is talking about the petitions of the Our Father, where Our Lord instructs us to say, when praying, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done . . .” We could spend many fruitful hours meditating on these two tremendously important clauses in the Lord’s Prayer. With regard to “thy will be done,” Saint Cyprian has this to say: “Our obligation is to do God’s will, and not our own. We must remember this if the prayer that Our Lord commanded us to say daily is to have any meaning on our lips. How unreasonable it is to pray that God’s will be done, and then not promptly obey it when he calls us from this world! . . . We struggle and resist like self-willed slaves and are brought into the Lord’s presence with sorrow and lamentation, not freely consenting to our departure, but constrained by necessity. and yet we expect to be rewarded with heavenly honors by him to whom we come against our will! Why then do we pray for the kingdom of heaven to come . . . what is the point of praying so often for its early arrival if we would rather serve the devil here than reign with Christ?

 We look upon paradise as our country, and a great crowd of our loved ones awaits us there, a countless throng of parents, brothers and children longs for us to join them. What joy to both for them and for us to see one another and embrace! Oh, the delight of that heavenly kingdom where there is no fear of death!

 This passage from the works of Saint Cyprian is very appropriate as we prepare for the holy season of Advent this Sunday. “Advent” means “the coming; the arrival.” The concept of the COMING of Our Divine Lord Jesus Christ is a very important one in Christian thought. He came as man some two thousand years ago. After about 33 years on earth, he went, body and soul, into heaven. But he promised that he would come again. The last words of Sacred Scripture are, “Come, Lord Jesus!” We pray daily, “Thy kingdom come.” And we ask Our Lady as often as we say the Hail Mary, “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” At the hour of our death, Jesus comes for us, and we go to be with him. So as we live in the reality of that moment of union, we celebrate the season of Advent — the coming of the Lord.

 Advent celebrates a reality which occurred in the past, and one that will occur in the future. The past reality is the coming of Jesus as a baby in the simplicity of Bethlehem; the future reality is the coming of Christ as our King in majesty upon the clouds. So we pray with eagerness and happy anticipation: COME, LORD JESUS!  Thank you for seeking God’s truth.  God bless you.  Father Victor Brown, O.P.

From time to time, people sit around and try to think of all the expressions taken from one of our literary classics that are still in common use. Shakespeare is good for this, and it is often surprising how many turns of phrase come from those immortal plays of his. Things like “into thin air” or “in broad daylight” are all due to Shakespeare’s novel ways of expressing an idea. This is also true of Sacred Scripture, and on this Wednesday we have a classic example of it. We have all heard the expression “we saw the handwriting on the wall,” meaning that we were able to foretell the future by the present in terms of finances, politics, health, the weather, and so forth.

On this Wednesday, because it is the last Wednesday of our church year, we have that ominous incident from the book of the prophet Daniel in the Old Testament. The pagan king Belshazzar of Babylon had enslaved the Hebrew people and brought many of them into captivity in his country where they could not enjoy political freedom or religious liberty. One night, the irreverent king ordered his servants to bring out the sacred vessels taken from the Temple in Jerusalem to be used at a banquet. This was totally sacrilegious—to put these objects destined for divine worship to completely secular use. While the king and his court were thus engaged, a hand appeared writing on the wall of the dining hall—writing words that the king and his court could not understand. The young Jewish prophet Daniel was sent for; he had a reputation of being able to interpret this kind of thing. He read the three words on the wall: MENE, TEKEL, PERES. And he went on to interpret them: because of the wickedness of the king and his irreverent behavior, his kingdom would be put to an end, the king himself had been weighed on the scales of justice and found wanting, and his kingdom would be divided between his enemies, the Medes and the Persians. To this day, we speak of “the handwriting on the wall” foretelling fearful consequences because of human sinfulness.

On Thanksgiving Day this year, as we sit down to our special meals, let us not do so irreverently or without being aware of what Thanksgiving is about. Let us be deeply grateful to God for all that we should be thankful for, and bear in mind the words of Our Divine Lord: if you love me, keep my commandments. We can paraphrase this saying: if you are grateful for my gifts, use them according to my will. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

All sorts of things come into our thoughts and prayers as we begin this new week, the week in which the great national holiday of Thanksgiving occurs.

Yesterday, November 22nd, was the anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy in Dallas on that infamous Friday afternoon in 1963. My classmates and I had been ordained just seven months before that and were still in the seminary during our last year of theology. Many years later, I was able to visit the building from which the shots were fired and to look out the window and get the same view that the killer got when he stood there and changed the course of our history.

Yesterday was also the date on which Saint Cecilia, the Roman martyr who is the patroness of musicians, is ordinarily commemorated. And today, we may commemorate any of two saints and one blessed. The saints: Clement, the fourth pope; Columban, an Irish monk who spread the faith on the continent of Europe during the so-called “dark ages”; and then Blessed Miguel Pro, the young Jesuit priest who faced a firing squad in Mexico City during the vicious persecution of the Church in that country in the 1920s. He died just a few years before I was born, and when I was a schoolboy, the Sisters in our classes often spoke of “Father Pro.” When I first went to Mexico in 1948, I was aware that he often sat on the public benches on the beautiful avenue called the Paseo de la Reforma, hearing confessions in secret, and celebrated Mass in secret to bring Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament to the Catholics of those times. However, he was eventually captured and condemned to death. He stood before the firing squad, holding out his arms in the form of a cross, and just before the command “Fire!” was given, he shouted in triumph, “Long live Christ the King!” That was on November 23, 1927, just two years before I was born.

And now, we are all preparing for Thanksgiving, and I hope that our nation will prepare to celebrate it as its name and purpose intend: to thank a generous and gracious God for his endless benefits to us, especially in this country of ours. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

A few days ago, I received a wonderfully heart-warming postcard that I’d like to share with you. Given all the bad news in the press these days, we can all use some GOOD news now and then which assure us that the Good News of the gospel is still operative in our world.

The postcard I received is from Spiritus Sanctus Academy (the name means “Holy Spirit”) in the city of Plymouth, Michigan, which is a western subjurb of Detroit. It is a picture postcard, bearing a wonderful photograph of seventeen smiling sixth graders and their teacher, a Dominican sister. The printing around the photograph says, “Spiritus Sanctus Academy celebrates the year of the priest.” Then below it, “The Priesthood is the love of the Heart of Jesus.”

The handwritten message on the other side of the postcard says, “Dear Father Victor, In honor of the year of the Priest our class remembered you in our prayers on 10-22. We just wanted to let you know that we are very thankful for your priesthood and for the gift that you are to the Church. May you be a great saint!” Then it’s signed, “In Christ, SSA Sixth Grade.”

I was delighted to receive this postcard, and so I wrote back to them thanking them for their good wishes and prayers for me, and told them that I hope that some of them will become priests and sisters, especially within our Dominican family.

More good news: yesterday in a weekly magazine called “The Week,” I came upon this item: “The director of a Texas Planned Parenthood clinic has joined a pro-life organization, saying she underwent a ‘change of heart’ while watching the termination of a pregnancy (that means an abortion). Abby Johnson, who has been with Planned Parenthood for nine years, quit her job after she saw an ultrasound image of a fetus “crumple” during an abortion, she said. She is now a member of Coalition for Life, which prays outside the clinic. “I thought: Never again,” she said. Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Diane Quest says that it is not unusual to have ‘complex thoughts and emotions about abortion. That’s why Planned Parenthood respects it as a personal, emotional issue.’

I can well understand how a moral person would have ‘complex thoughts and emotions’ upon seeing a living child crumple within its mother’s womb while he or she is being killed. It’s a great pity that Planned Parenthood doesn’t have more respect for those human lives which they are willing to destroy upon payment of the required amount of money. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

Two favorite concepts of mine enter into our religious thoughts on this 18th day of November in the year of grace, 2009. One is that we can, if we wish, celebrate the liturgical memorial of Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne who came so close to our own lives in this part of the world and in the story of her experiences; the other is that earlier today, Pope Benedict spoke of the beauty of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe which stand so splendidly as witnesses to the faith and the devotion of those who built them 900 years ago.

Let’s consider Saint Philippine Duchesne first. She was a very strong-minded French woman who lived in the tumultuous history of her nation during the French Revolution and the era of Napoleon. She had wanted to become a Visitandine nun, founded by Saint Francis de Sales and Saint Jane Frances de Chantal. But the political situation in France during those unhappy days when the guillotine blades cut short many vocations to religious and priestly life made it impossible for her to become a Visitandine Nun. However, she came to know of the work of another foundress, Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat, whose spiritual and educational ambitions were similar to Philippine’s. She joined the new group, called the Society of the Sacred Heart. She had great energy, zeal, desire to extend the kingdom of her dear Savior. She wanted to got to America, where other French missionaries were going to preach the gospel. But Mother Barat realized that for a successful foreign mission there must be a great deal of organization, preparation, and provisions, and had her hands full with the work in their native France and Europe. The idea of venturing into the forests of the unknown New World where savage natives had been killing missionaries for two hundred years didn’t strike Mother Barat as practical or wise. Finally, in 1818, Philippine Duchesne was allowed to lead a group of her sisters across the very rough Atlantic. After a brief rest with the Ursuline Nuns in New Orleans, they sailed up the Mississippi to the town of St. Charles, Missouri, where the two great streams: the Missouri and the Mississippi, converged. Here the Sisters established themselves, eager to work among the native peoples and the rough and tumble white population who were leading a typical frontier life, often containing little of the gospel principles.

Years later, one of the Religious of the Sacred Heart wrote the biography of Saint Philippine Duchesne. She entitled it, “The Glorious Failure,” because both objectively and in her own estimation, most of what Mother Duchesne attempted did not succeed. What frustration! What sorrow she must have felt. She loved Jesus with all her heart; she had turned heaven and earth to get to American and spend herself for the evangelization of those people. But to begin with, she could not learn their languages, and they had no interest in learning hers beyond the price of tobacco, the sale of horses, mules, rifles, ammunition and gunpowder, and the building of flatboats to transport merchandise up and down the great rivers of this America that she was learning about.

Finally, one of the aristocratic nuns from Europe came to make a tour of inspection of the Sacred Heart missions fields. She decided that Mother Duchesne was simply not cut out
for that kind of work and sent her back to Saint Charles to remain in the convent, take care of the housework, and pray for the success of her more active sisters. What a blow to this woman whose heart was bursting with energy, plans, dreams, and apostolic zeal! But God had spoken through her superiors, and she obeyed unquestioningly. She spent whole nights in prayer, and the Indians came to call her, “The Woman Who Always Prays.” Resigned to be relegated to the background of the missionary endeavor in America, she did what she could for the nuns, the students, and the native hangers-on. And after a very difficult life of frustration, failure, disappointment, and fear of having badly served her Lord, she died at the age of 83 on November 18, 1852. She has been canonized and her shrine in St. Charles is one of the garden spots from which spiritual energy radiates out into this land which she and many others fertilized by their prayers and labors that it might produce good fruit for Christ, our Lord. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

It is interesting how coincidences occur in life. Today, for example, we retired priests celebrated Mass in our house chapel in honor of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, a noblewoman who was particularly concerned with the poor. The thought was expressed as we meditated on her life that good health is a great wealth, and bad health is one of the many forms of poverty.

Then, as I came to my computer to read the daily Vatican Information Services, I found that today the Holy See and our holy father, Pope Benedict, are speaking of the conference of the Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care which, this year, focusses on deafness in our world. According to its statistics, there are some 278 million hearing-impaired people in the world, 59 million of whom are profoundly deaf. And because of my hearing problem, I fall into the former category. For the first 75 years of my life, I heard quite normally and took that gift totally for granted. Now, as I lose my hearing, I realize what a great gift it is and how much impaired hearing is a handicap. You lose a good deal of contact with the outside world, much of your understanding of what is being said either by people in your physical presence or on radio or television, and you realize that it is a problem for your family, friends, and associates to try to communicate with you when you have to keep asking them to repeat what they’ve said. The tendency is for them simply to say nothing, and thus the deaf or hard-of-hearing person is consigned to an increasing world of silence and non-communication. There are those who say, “Use hearing aids.” Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy, since the science of hearing aids is a very young one and for some people, they are more of a hindrance than a help.

It is common for us to say, when we see a handicapped person, “poor fellow” or “poor lady.” We recognize that there are many ways of being poor, and impaired health is one of them. We all know the tremendously moving story of Helen Keller, the child who became both blind and deaf when she was a toddler and had to overcome those tremendous handicaps with the help of her teacher, Annie Sullivan, who came to be called “The Miracle Worker” because she was so successful in opening the wall of darkness and silence and allowing Helen to learn, to know, to live a very valuable life, to become an inspiration and example for many.

Our Divine Lord says to us, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” This means, not that we don’t have a lot of money, but the awareness of our own lack of personal gifts or talents or abilities or, most of all, virtue. The child Jesus, who had to learn to read and write and eat with a spoon, despite the fact that he is God, is a marvelous example of poverty of spirit. His blessed mother must often have marveled at why she had to teach him, her Creator and Redeemer, these basic skills of human life. But that was all part of the incarnation— God becoming a human, “like us in all things but sin.” Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.

On November 16 in the year 1093, the beloved Queen Margaret of Scotland died. She was an English princess whose father had fled to Scotland to escape the Norman conquest of his own country. There Margaret met and married the king, Malcolm. Their daughter Matilda married King Henry I of England, and that couple became the forebears of the present British royal family. The city of Edinburgh in Scotland is filled with historical memories of Queen Margaret who is also Saint Margaret of Scotland. She was a deeply devout lady whose special interest was the helping of the poor in her adopted country, and because of her constant concern for them, she was beloved by her people.

It is interesting to reflect that the name “Margaret” comes from the Latin word “margarita,” meaning “pearl.” Down through the years it has been one of of the most popular girl’s names, taking on numerous variations. It has given us Margot, Meg, Greta, Gretel, Gretchen, and somehow, girls whose real name is Margaret are sometimes called “Peg” or “Peggy.” I’m not sure whether girls began to bear the name Margarita or Margaret because of the natural beauty of the pearl, or in reference to Our Lord’s parable of the fisherman who found “a pearl of great price” for which he sold all his lesser jewels.

On my one and only visit to the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, I was able to visit the little chapel constructed by order of Saint Margaret within the walls of Edinburgh Castle where she lived as queen. When she arrived there as the bride of the king, she was saddened to find no chapel within the castle walls, and so asked the king to build a chapel on the grounds of the castle. It stands there today, nearly a thousand years later, as a testimonial to the faith of “Good Queen Margaret” and to her love of the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament which she wanted to be part of the daily life of herself, her husband, and her children. When we attend Mass and receive Holy Communion, we are following the example of Saint Margaret and countless other saints and holy men and women down through the ages whose faith led them to believe and rejoice in the presence of our Divine Lord with us in the Sacrament. Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.