Author: St. Charles Borromeo

Bulletin

Advent/Christmas Season Schedule 2019

| St. Charles Borromeo

Thursday, November 28: Thanksgiving Day
Mass at 9 AM – no midday Mass

Sunday, December 1: 1st Sunday of Advent
Mass at 9 AM, 11:15 AM, 7 PM
Advent Faith Sharing Program Begins

Sunday, December 8: 2nd Sunday of Advent
Mass at 9 AM, 11:15 AM, 7 PM
Advent Wreath Sale after all Masses

Monday, December 9: Immaculate Conception
Mass at 12:10 PM

Sunday, December 15: 3rd Sunday of Advent
Morning Mass at 9 AM
Mass with Nativity Pageant 11:15 AM followed by Meet & Greet Reception
Evening Mass at 7 PM followed by Meet & Greet Reception

Sunday, December 22: 4th Sunday of Advent
Mass at 9 AM, 11:15 AM, 7 PM

Tuesday, December 24: Christmas Eve
Children’s Mass with Nativity Pageant at 5 PM
Christmas Mass During the Night (Midnight Mass) at 8 PM

Wednesday, December 25: Christmas Day
Mass at 9 AM and 11:15 AM (No 7 PM Mass)

Bulletin

Annual Pastoral and Financial Reports 2019

| St. Charles Borromeo

The Parish Pastoral Council and Finance Council presented a five-year strategic plan last year at this time.

One year in, we offer a status report of our progress, as well as a summary of our current financial situation, at the following link: St Charles Annual Report Final Nov

We ask that you carefully read the report and prayerfully consider how you can help St. Charles and each other over the next year.

Thank you for your support of St. Charles!

 

Messages from the Pastor

33rd Sunday Ordinary Time – “Rule the Earth with Justice”

| St. Charles Borromeo

St. Elizabeth of Hungary from our sanctuary stained glass. A princess, she gave up her position of royalty and wealth to serve the poor, endearing her as the patron saint of charities. Her feast day is November 17.

From the Bishops Conference

This week, the American Bishops met to discuss issues facing the Church. One of them was Catholic participation in electoral politics. They decided to reissue “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” with an update but without substantial revision. This was written 12 years ago before the election of Pope Francis and there was concern that the document did not recognize his perspective especially on the interrelatedness of all matters of life. The suggestion to include paragraph #101 from Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation “GAUDETE ET EXSULTAT” in its entirety was  rejected as too long. You however may find these less than 200 words enlightening and informative.

101. The other harmful ideological error is found in those who find suspect the social engagement of others, seeing it as superficial, worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist. Or they  relativize it, as if there are other more important matters, or the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend. Our defence of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery, and every form of rejection.[84] We cannot uphold an ideal of holiness that would ignore injustice in a world where some revel, spend with abandon and live only for the latest consumer goods, even as others look on from afar, living their entire lives in abject poverty.

Malachi 3:19-20a
33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Nov. 17, 2019 

The prophet Malachi, who we read today, lived in Jerusalem after the temple was restored (515 BC) but before Ezra came to reform its administration. (450 BC).  About 460 BC would be a good estimate. This situation is reflected in his message.  

As we have seen many times, the Jews who responded to the call to return to Jerusalem and rebuild it were pioneers despite themselves. They began with high hopes that they could replace everything which was lost but discovered that clocks do not move backwards. None of them would have had personal memories of Jerusalem or the temple and they often lapsed into romanticizing the glories of the past and underestimating the difficulties of the present. These illusions were quickly ended.  

The rebuilt temple was adequate, but no more than that, and the institution of Kingship was effectively eliminated. The Persian overlords would support a restored temple but not a king. The temple alone would be the sign of unity for the Jews. Malachi’s job as prophet was to strengthen it, despite the less than stellar quality of the religious leadership.  

As our Patron Charles Borromeo discovered, reforming the clergy is not for the faint of heart and it takes the direct action of God himself to accomplish anything. Malachi uses the traditional language of the “Day of the Lord”.  

God tells the people:
Lo, I am sending my messenger
to prepare the way before me;
And suddenly there will come to the temple 
the LORD whom you seek (Mal 3:1)  

This will not be a social call:  

For he is like the refiner’s fire, 
or like the fuller’s lye.
3 He will sit refining and purifying (silver), 
and he will purify the sons of Levi, (Mal 3:2–3). 

Then, as now, reform needs to start with the clergy, “the sons of Levi”. Where the clergy contains the priesthood, as with the Jews of this day and Catholics always, the integrity of the sacrifice is of key importance.  

Refining them like gold or like silver 
that they may offer due sacrifice to the LORD.
4 Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem 
will please the LORD (Mal 3:3–4). 

 After the clergy have been cleansed, those who are most influential need to be confronted: 

 5 I will draw near to you for judgment, 
and I will be swift to bear witness
Against the sorcerers, adulterers, and perjurers, 
those who defraud the hired man of his wages, 

Against those who defraud widows and orphans; 
those who turn aside the stranger,
and those who do not fear me, says the LORD of hosts (Mal 3:5) 

Note how he puts all of these together as those who do not “Fear me”. These are people who through great success or great failure have lost their awe of God.   

They show that by ceasing to obey the law of God: 

Surely I, the LORD, do not change,
nor do you cease to be sons of Jacob.
7 Since the days of your fathers you have turned aside 
from my statutes, and have not kept them.
Return to me, and I will return to you, 
says the LORD of hosts. (Mal 3:6–7). 

This robbed them of their enthusiasm, but they must begin to be restored to the Lord’s favor: 

Yet you say, “How must we return?”
8 Dare a man rob God? Yet you are robbing me!
And you say, “How do we rob you?” 
In tithes and in offerings!
10 Bring the whole tithe
into the storehouse,
That there may be food in my house, 
and try me in this, says the LORD of hosts. (Mal 3:7–10). 

The decline is most clearly seen in failing to supply the needs of worship. Worship is a matter of Justice. We owe God obedience and submission. It is mandatory. Tithes not only supported the maintenance of the temple but the care of the clergy who at that time had no other source of income and we have seen again the care that God wishes of the poor in Mal 3:3-5. 

If they return to proper worship and wider justice, all nations will call you blessed, for you will be a delightful land, says the LORD of hosts. (Mal 3:12). 

We now come to the section selected for us this week. Malachi is structured around six pronouncements with several debates. Each debate begins with the Lord accusing the people of turning away from Him. Today we hear:  

13 You have defied me in word, says the LORD, 
yet you ask, “What have we spoken against you?”
14 You have said, “It is vain to serve God, 
and what do we profit by keeping his command
(Mal 3:13–14) 

They then list the times they have seen the wicked prosper (Mal 3: 15) but God assures those who fear him that there is a record book which lists them as well as those who do not (Mal 3:16) This book will not opened in heaven at a final judgment of all but in this world when the Lord comes to judge the world: 

Then you will again distinguish between the just and the wicked,
Between the person who serves God, and the one who does not. (Mal 3:18)  

The day of the Lord is like the power of the Sun. For those who do not fear the Lord the Sun will be experienced as an oven that will set them on fire and render them into stubble, mere cut stalks of grain. Indeed, they will be burned so completely that there will not even be that:  They will set them on fire, leaving them neither root nor branch. (Mal 3:19) 

For those who fear the Lord, however, the sun will be experienced as justice with healing rays or wings. 

There is much that we could say here but let us limit ourselves to two: 

Malachi assumes that this reckoning will be a purely earthly affair. The just will be given honor in the sight of their enemies. But this did not happen. There was improvement with the reforms of Ezra, but nothing was really overturned. Compare this to the reading from Maccabees last week. There we saw that the reward for the just would be physical, because they would get their bodies back – but in the future. In the 300 years between Malachi and 2 Maccabees, the Jews came to realize that there would not be purely earthy vindication of God’s justice. Yet God is just before all else, and so there must be an Afterlife. We can never emphasize enough that the resurrection of the Body was revealed and understood to proclaim the LORD’S commitment to justice for His people. If there was no afterlife, then the LORD would be accused of not fulfilling his promises and be thus either a charlatan or simply deluded. This is not true to revelation so there must be something after this. The afterlife is not to reward our faithfulness, but to proclaim God’s truthfulness.  

The other observation is that Worship is a matter of Justice. I was underwhelmed when I first heard this in the seminary decades ago. Yet, as the professor assured us that with experience, we would not only see this, but its effects as well. He was certainly correct. Failing to worship God is doing Him an injustice, and if we treat Him unjustly, should we be surprised if we treat others unjustly as well? It works the other way as well. Those who treat others unjustly will pull back from worshiping a living God. They may build wonderful buildings but will not give their hearts. Justice and Worship are always linked.  

At the inaugural meeting of our group for young professionals, one of the members said: “Don’t let Monday ruin your Sunday”. We might add, nor the LORD’s Sunday. On Sunday at St. Charles, we praised Him in word and song, offered our hearts, and pledged to rebuild His Church, but if we do not act justly, then all this is empty and hollow.  

Malachi tells us that the “sun of justice will arise with healing in his wings”. Let us show that we love Him on Monday by fulfilling the words of the prophet Amos: “But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”. (Amos 5:24) 

Homilies, Podcast

32nd Sunday Ordinary Time – Fr. Gribowich homily

| St. Charles Borromeo

Transcript:
Good morning, everyone! It’s always great to be back home. My name if you don’t know who I am, is Father John Gribowich, which I recognize some faces here. I taught Central Catholic for about 10 years before I was a priest. Always great to be back home. It’s always the danger that, as Jesus said, that no prophet is never accepted in his native land, so I don’t know where my words will land with you today, but I’ll try my best to share with you what I feel the Lord’s put in my heart.

You know what, this past week up in Brooklyn, where I’m a priest, I participate in something called Dial-A-Priest, and this was a way to kind of interact with 4th and 5th graders at different schools. We would do this all through video conferencing, through a Skype session. And the children are all ready for the priest to show up, and they had all these questions. And of course, like when this happens, you very quickly get humbled, because children ask the darndest questions, right? And the first question that came out to me was, “so if God created the whole world and God created everything, then who created God?”

My gosh, you need like a PhD in Theology to answer some of these questions. And I’m like, “well, no one made God. Next question!”

And of course another question question I got was, “when we die and we go to Heaven, what’s Heaven going to be?” And I’m like, that’s a good question, because when you think about it all of us in some way shape or form ought to ask ourselves the question what is heaven going to be like. And for many of us I think we may just reduce it to being something – well it sounds like a better place than hell, so I guess I want to go to heaven.

But I think that a lot of us will lead to places of thinking of Heaven as some type of place that’s almost akin to like a resort, maybe, and we kind of look at it from a very material way.

Now, that is totally fine, because I think I do the same. In fact, if you ask me what do I expect heaven to be, like I said well you know I think I really expect heaven for me to be like, walking into like a really nice old-fashioned Irish pub, having Guinness after Guinness, and in the corner will be Bob Dylan and his band playing for all of eternity and I’ll be sitting next to Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley and I’ll be pretty content. As you can tell, I love Guinness and I love Bob Dylan and I love Irish Pubs, so that’s kind of what I want heaven to look like for the rest of the rest of my eternal life.

But the fact of the matter is that no matter how grandiose of an idea we could place in our minds of what looks like, the reality is that heaven is not a place as much as it is a relationship. Heaven in itself is a relationship.

Now of course the question is its relationship with who and I think probably would think well I guess the default answer is God. It is a relationship with God, and of course that’s true, but I think that what heaven is, it is a place where we are able to be in a perfected state of relationships with each other.

And when we think about it, what we really desire in this world are perfected relationships. We desire us to get along with people, right? If we look at it on a grand scale, then we would love it if we live in a world where there was no war, wherenNations got along, right? And there was no Injustice, that there was no poor people, or are there people suffering from other types of inequalities. We would love it if there was this great harmonious type of existence, and of course we thow up our hands saying it will never happen, but of course there are many people working for justice and in our own local world in our own global families, we realize how painful it is when children don’t talk to their parents, or when there’s alienation between siblings, or when just our neighbor just treats us in a way that just we can’t figure out why they’re doing what they’re doing.

All of us struggle with the relationships in our lives and we wish that somehow everything was right, but there was a genuine harmony and basically what we’re desiring what we were desiring that harmony, we’re getting along perfectly and enjoying each other’s company and loving each other and receiving the fullness of love. When we are desiring those things in our world, that’s simply proof that we are desiring heaven, we are desiring a place where are we are in harmony with our brothers and sisters. Because the proof of heaven is revealed through our desires. Why would we have desires that cannot be fulfilled?

We have lots of very easy desires, right? I’m hungry – I go open up the fridge, I eat something: fulfilled, right? I want a beer, I go to the pub, I get a Guinness: fulfilled.

The reality is that the desires in our hearts push us to seek higher things, to seek things that do not actually end – to seek a perfected state. We’re hardwired to not want to die, which is why we fight against death.

Now at the school that I go to, there’s signs around like, kind of talking about the different accomplishments that the university has been able to do over the last few years, and one of the signs, banners said, “Living to 125: a Reality.” I sit there thinking about that, like, do I want to live to 125? I don’t know why in the world anyone would want to live to 125, but you can tell that the reason why that’s such a great accomplishment is because we don’t want to die.

We fear death and the reality is that none of us can escape it, even if we had all the science in the world that makes us live to another 50, 60 years. Death is always around the corner, because we know of how many times a very tragic thing happens. As I always say, we can walk out the church today and be hit by a bus, right?

Life is very fragile, but yet we desire to live, and the Lord today in the Gospel is really showing to us something about that desire. The whole teaching of this Gospel is all contingent upon who Jesus is speaking to, just like those 4th and 5th graders were trying to get me with their questions. Well, the people who are trying to get Jesus in this Gospel are this group of Jews known as the Sadducees. And the Sadducees, well they didn’t believe in the resurrection, so they were sad, you see?

[pause] Oh, that didn’t go over too well – it’s too early. [groans]

Anyway, they were always looking at the things of this world as being an end in themselves and the Sadducees were very comfortable people. They were the ones who have a lot of well in a lot of position in society, so in their minds the way that God would reveal His blessings was by them having a lot of things in the world – a lot of material stuff, a lot of status. That was a sign of God’s blessing. This idea of heaven was like that was like, not necessary in their theological worldview because they had heaven on Earth if you will.

So of course they are trying to trap Jesus and saying, all right, so if we get married here and you have a situation where people are married five, six, seven, times, who were they married to in heaven? Jesus reveals that is, like, marriage doesn’t exist in heaven – it’s something that exists here.

And I think that we have to ask ourselves the question, what is the vocation of marriage ultimately doing for us. In a very real localized way it’s helping us to perfect a relationship with another. Which is why we are married for life, we enter a commitment, and we also believe that somehow God blesses and graces that commitment. Because what that is, is a preparation for eternity, and then in eternity we’re no longer have to be working at our relationships and perfecting them, but they are perfected in God’s eyes. The same God who wills each and everyone of us into existence in the first place. The same God who provides for us each and every day. The same God who helps us through the ups and downs of our married lives. That same God is who is waiting for us in heaven to allow us to experience that which is in the deepest desires of our heart, which is harmony with our Brothers and sisters

So, today at this Mass as we receive Jesus, maybe we recognize that we are not just given the strength and the grace to be in communion with God but we’re given the strength in the grace to be in communion with each of our brothers and sisters. The body of Christ at the altar strengthens the body of Christ that we all are. That is one in the same.

May we pray for each other – not so much to think that we need more things, or we need to acquire even the perfect state of heaven where we have everything the way we wanted.

Let us pray today to empty ourselves to be the person God wants us to be, for our brothers and sisters.

May God bless you all.

Homilies

32nd Sunday Ordinary Time – Fr. Smith homily

| St. Charles Borromeo

Today’s gospel reading may seem arcane at best and ludicrous at worst. Yet it is serious and raises a crucial question for both the Jews and Christians: “What happens to the good person after death?” 

The Sadducees did not believe in immortality in the Greek sense of the word. The Greek belief that a purely spiritual soul was separated from the person at death to exist independently for all eternity was incomprehensible. Like the Pharisees they thought that humanity required having a body. Unlike the Pharisees the Sadducees did not believe that our body was resurrected, which our first reading showed meant restored and returned to the person at “the end of the world”, but held that the person lived on in their families. That is why a brother had to marry a deceased brother’s wife if she was childless. The deceased brother could live on only in his children. We laugh as one brother after another married this unfortunate woman but for them it was not a laughing matter at all. They may have desired to put Jesus on the spot but it was not done frivolously.  

If people of our time were to object to a rather literal understanding of the resurrection of the Body, we would mostly ask where would all the people be put. They would take up too much space. That was not a pressing issue for the Sadducees. They were more concerned about community. The legitimacy that marriage provided for lineage was the most important issue. When Jesus says that in the coming age people neither marry nor are given in marriage he is challenging their beliefs to their core. Why should they believe him, indeed why should we? 

St Luke’s answer is fascinating and beautifully crafted.  

After Jesus’ execution, Mary Magdalene and the other women go to the tomb and discover that it is empty. Two men in dazzling garments tell them that He is risen as hH said. What this means is revealed to the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They meet Jesus and do not in any way think He is a ghost or spirit. He reveals himself to them and then disappears. He reappears seemingly out of nowhere as they were telling their story to the apostles in the upper room. He is not a ghost nor is he a zombie: He has a real body, He is risen.  

So what? 

It could seem as this is a nice way for Jesus to tell us that He has won and that we should follow him here so that we can also be risen and to go to heaven. True enough, but insufficient and no Jew would have made that mistake. That Jesus has been risen NOW means that the new world he promised has begun NOW. There are consequences not only in how we are to act, but why. 

Matthew and Mark as well as Luke tell us that Jesus has come to bring the Kingdom. The Kingdom is harmony between god and humankind, among all people and with nature. It begins with his resurrection. It will not be completed on earth but it is our task to make it as present as we can here and now. The Kingdom is not made real by our eloquence but by our actions. 

We have a perfect example of this with the recently concluded synod on the Amazon. The church called Bishops but also lay leaders to Rome to discuss the needs of this important region.  Disharmony reigns on every level. The Amazon is the lungs of the world and is being destroyed by carelessness and greed. This is maintained by an unjust use of power that has reduced many indigenous people to virtual slavery. The church is the only institution capable of combating it but because of lack of access to the Eucharist, antiquated notions of leadership and a failure to use the actual cultural expressions of the people, the church discovered that she too needs reform. The demands of the kingdom are immediate because Christ IS risen here and now and here and now we are called to manifest our rebirth. 

Too often envisioning the afterlife can become a parlor game. This is pointless and unscriptural: St Paul tells us: 

Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, 
Nor have entered into the heart of man 
The things which God has prepared for those who love Him (1 Cor 2:9) 

Paul also tells us: ”But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Cor 15:20)

We must then ask if we have been raised with him what fruits of the Kingdom have been born through us.