August 20, 2018
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 20th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year B) on August 19, 2018, at St. Austin Parish in Austin, TX. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 34; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58.
This is our third week with John’s “Bread of Life” discourse. Today, the Church pairs this with readings about wisdom.
Last Sunday night at GAP, our ministry for graduates and professionals in their 20s and 30s, we talked about wisdom. We agreed that wisdom is something different than knowledge. Some of the wisest people among us do not have college degrees. Wisdom is pragmatic. Wisdom is about the most essential things in life. Jews and Christians have long held that wisdom is from God. Our first reading today is a personification of God as a woman called “Lady Wisdom.”
And I don’t know about you, but I am desperately in need of God’s wisdom this weekend. I am disgusted, sad, and outraged at the reports of extensive sexual abuse of minors by priests in 6 dioceses in Pennsylvania and the consistent choice of authorities in the Church to cover up the scandals rather than protect the people of God.
In light of this crisis, we use some of the Church’s prayers of reconciliation in today’s Mass. However, they may make us feel uncomfortable. The prayers of reconciliation ask us to acknowledge our sins. Yet most of us probably feel that this crisis is not about our sins, but about the sins of others. We cannot imagine seeking healing in these cases until justice begins to be done and changes are made.
Nevertheless, let us do our best to use the prayers at our disposal today to ask the Holy Spirit to renew the face of the earth.
Lady Wisdom sets out a banquet, inviting all of us to come eat her food and drink her wine, no matter our station in life. St. Paul exhorts us not to be involved in debauchery, but to live in wisdom, as these are evil days.
Well, in my six years of priesthood, I have never felt such evil in the Church itself as I have felt this week, in light of the attorney general’s report from Pennsylvania. When I read the list of 99 priests in my home diocese of Pittsburgh who sexually abused minors, my heart sank. One of the lead stories of The New York Times last week included interviews with people at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the very building I was in when I first felt the call to priesthood. I didn’t know any of the 99 priests well, but the one I was most familiar with is profiled on the front page of The New York Times today.
Now, let’s be clear: when we talk about “the Church,” the best pronouns to use are “we” and “us.” We are all the Church. And we know that all of us are human. But to think that the Church, which is supposed to be guided by the Holy Spirit, and led by men who are supposed to have pledged their lives to the care of the rest of the world, is sickening in the light of the recent reports. And if you read the details, the more sickened and disgusted you will become. These men who abused children tried to “spiritualize” the abuse.
Today is not a day for excuses. Today is not a day to talk about context. Today is not a day to talk about the changes made by the United States Church since the 2002 Boston scandal.
Today is a day for anger. Anger is a God-given emotion. And the anger we feel is righteous anger. How could so many different bishops and administrators, for so many years, in 6 different dioceses, have been consistently more concerned with covering up the scandal than protecting the vulnerable? As one friend has said, “It’s a very good thing that I’m not God or there would be a lot of ‘smiting’ going on.”
Today is a day for grief. First and foremost, we grieve for the more than 1,000 children who we now know were abused by priests in Pennsylvania. Who knows how many other victims there were? And being from Pennsylvania, I have a hunch that there are similar statistics in many other dioceses in the United States and around the world. We grieve for all the unknown victims. May the Church do what it can to provide all victims with the financial resources to get some professional help to deal with the absolutely devastating effects of the abuse they’ve endured. We grieve for all the charitable programs that will have to be cancelled for the lack of funds. We grieve for the all the innocent people who will lose their jobs because the Church will not have adequate funds to pay them. We grieve for ourselves, as we question if we can ever place our trust in this institution again.
Today is a day for sadness. Today is a day for going deep into the depths of our pain.
However, today is also a day to once again place our trust in the Eucharist. Jesus Christ assures us that wherever we gather in his name, he is there. We gather in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and we can be assured that Jesus Christ, the bread of life, is here with us. And as we come forward today, perhaps feeling more broken than usual, we seek God’s wisdom, a wisdom that surpasses all human wisdom.
Let us pray:
Come Holy Spirit, come as a fire. Give us wisdom. Give us courage.
Give us the confidence to know that WE are the Church. And through your guidance, you will guide us to renew your Church, so it may be more fully conformed to the image of your Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Fr. Chuck is away this weekend, but even without consulting him, I can assure you that we of St. Austin Catholic Parish and St. Austin Catholic School want to do our part to eradicate abuse in the Church and in the world. If you have ideas about what we as a parish and school community can do to help one another, please feel free to send me an e-mail, and I will share your responses with Fr. Chuck and the rest of the St. Austin staff.