This week we continue with the games of the Pharisees. Again they are trying to trap Jesus. One the favorite past times of the Pharisees, beside laying snares for Jesus, was to discuss among themselves which of the 613 commandments of the Jewish Law was the greatest. Today, we hear the Word of God in the flesh—Jesus, who is the author of all law, set the record straight. He points out the greatest; in fact, what lies at the very heart of the Law—LOVE.

The greatest Commandment is the first, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind and soul.” And the second is like it; you shall love your neighbor as yourself. The great St. Augustine commenting on the relationship between the two greatest commandments said, “If your ever confused, everything in the bible, and all of the Church teachings points to these two laws, everything else is nothing but commentary.” Everything else our stewardship, the living out of our mission, our apostolate, everything else is contained in these two laws, why? Because God is Love itself.

We, as Christians, have heard these greatest of commandments many times before, but have we really thought about them deeply? There is actually a proper order in following them, for you see you can’t love one without first loving the other. You can’t love your neighbor if you don’t first love your God, that is love Him totally, absolutely, first and above all else. Then second you can’t love God if you hate your neighbor, any neighbor, period.

How does one understand these two laws and the order and relationship between them? What does it look like to live them correctly and with a proper balance? Well the best way is to understand them and see them lived correctly is as always to look at the lives of the saints. And in our day, we don’t have to just look to the saints of old to see the proper order and living out of the first and second commandment, we have so many contemporary examples available to us, for instance, Saint Mother Theresa of Calcutta.

There is the example of Mother and a couple of her sisters coming across a poor man dying in the gutters along one of the streets of Calcutta. Now the gutters of the streets of Calcutta are actually the sewage system. And if it could be any worse, this man’s body was literally infested with worms and maggots. One could only image the stench and the repulsiveness of such a sight. Nevertheless, Mother and the sisters pick the man up, ignoring the stench, ignoring the sight, his dirty body soiling their pure white habits. They lovingly carried him back to the home where they cared for the poorest of the poor. There they cleansed this man and cared for his wounds picking out of his flesh the vermin that had infested it. And they did it which such care, as one observer noted; “that you would have sworn they were doing it to Christ Himself.” The man, shortly before He died, looked up at Mother and said, “Now I know that God exists, for no-one would have done what you did to me unless God was real and He and His love existed… With that he died in peace, not only with his body cared for, but his soul as well. Later a person said to Mother, “I wouldn’t have done what you did for a million dollars!” And Mother replied, “Neither would I, but I would do it for love of Christ.”

Mother, by her example, taught us the power we have as Catholic Christians to change hearts and souls when we love God before and above all else and then live that love by loving others as ourselves. She on many occasions gave us the practical secrets to living, not just a life of social work, but a life of true charity—loving others not just with human love, but with the divine love of Jesus, with Jesus, alive in one’s soul. On one occasion she said, “My sisters and I could never ever do what we do in the streets of Calcutta unless we begin every day with an hour of adoration before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, followed by Holy Mass and the worthy reception of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. She also once said, “You will never see Christ in the face of the poor, unless you first see Him (through faith) in the Holy Eucharist. She also said once to one of her sister’s; “It doesn’t matter who you see in the face of the poor, but who they see in your eyes! Do they see Jesus and His love alive in you?!” Mother on so many occasions said the same things in different ways, giving us the secret to her great power and holiness and a proper understanding of the two greatest commandments.

The great error of our day is actually a confusion of the proper order of these two commandments. It is a very attractive error. Many think that true religion consists primarily in loving and serving one’s neighbor, but they are wrong. True religion consists primarily in serving, loving and adoring God, first in our Worship of Him during the Sacred Liturgy of the Church, offered worthily and correctly, and then, by following His commandments and the teachings of His Church with the help of His grace offered to us in the Sacred Liturgy; including of course, all the Sacraments of the Church. The Sacraments give us the power, God’s power, to love God greater and to show that love by loving our neighbor as ourselves with God’s love not just our own. If only us Catholics truly began to comprehend the power of the Sacraments we would change our current world overnight…but they must be received with faith.

This contemporary error of putting service of neighbor before the worship of God, is shown by those who think they are righteous and good because they give food to the poor and do good works but then don’t worship God according to the third commandment so that Jesus and His Divine Love is alive in them through grace; and so aren’t able to truly live out the commandments and teachings of Church in the state of grace, that is with, in and through Jesus and His love in them.
This same error of and inversion of the first two commandments was shown in past years by some making the emphasis of our Religious Ed programs consist in service projects to the poor, but failing to teach our children to adore and then to live the doctrines of the church along with the Commandments. Don’t get me wrong, we need to have our kids do service projects, but we need most importantly to first lead them to a deeper faith in the Holy Mass which is the proper worship of God, the Sacraments (especially the Most Blessed Sacrament), as well as give them the doctrines of our Church for they are the truth that gives freedom and life—we can’t truly love God or neighbor with the doctrines of the Church.

I once heard a prelate in the Church comment that there is a danger in the growth of adoration of the Eucharist in our day. He said that the danger is that of making faith just about Jesus and me. While it is true that our faith cannot be only about Jesus and me, the problem is not found in adoring Jesus during Holy Hours of adoration or during Mass. While it is possible for one to adore Jesus in Holy hour and to receive Him at Holy Mass and then not go out and love ones neighbor, it is impossible to love one neighbor correctly with charity without adoring Jesus during Mass or Holy Hours and receiving Him worthily. Grace has to be cooperated with yes, but it must first be received. We have to come in contact with the very source of Love before we can truly love; and God is the source of love for He is Love Itself.

The first commandment is not only a commandment to Love God but to love Him through Adoration. Adoration is coming before God in humility realizing that we are the creature and He is the Creator and everything, everything is a gift from Him. We are but poor with nothing to offer Him except ourselves, our wills. And even this we don’t know how to do, because we are so attached to ourselves and what we have, especially our wills and so we lack docility to God’s will. To adore we need God’s help. And here is where the Holy Mass comes in.

At the Holy Mass we are able to be present at the greatest and only perfect act of adoration and love the world has ever seen, that of the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. The Sacrifice of the cross was (and is) really God adoring God, because it was (and is) Jesus adoring the Father. Because the Holy Mass, by the power of the Holy Spirit working through the gift of the Sacred Priesthood, makes present in time and space the same sacrifice of Calvary, we can more and more offer ourselves to the Father along with, in and through Jesus’ own sacrifice, thus practically carrying out the first commandment, to love God above all else. We are then empowered by receiving Jesus Divine power and Love, by receiving His own Sacred Heart in the Holy Eucharist to go out and love our neighbor as ourselves.

But the Holy Eucharist only has the power to transform us to the extent we die to self, to our will, purify and clean ourselves in the sacrament of confession and then offer ourselves to Father through, in and with Jesus in loving response to the Father’s love in the gift of His Son in the Holy Eucharist. The more we die to self, the more we offer ourselves in adoration with great faith, trust and love, the more we can take the love of Jesus, Jesus Himself, out to all we meet in our homes, schools and work. The more we then live a life or purity, that is a life of holiness, the more then we can be transformed into love at Holy Mass.

That great orator and priest, Archbishop Fulton Sheen once describe this adoration at Holy Mass when he said, At the Holy Mass we come to the foot of the cross now transplanted from Calvary onto the altar of our own church and there Jesus hanging on the cross looks out over all present and says, I can no longer suffer and die for the souls of mankind, will you give me your human nature so that I can continue the work of the salvation of souls, suffering and dying for them and loving them in and through you.”

“No greater love is than this, than a man who would lay down his life for his friends.” Only by growing and perfecting in love the self-offering of ourselves in adoration to the Father through Jesus during the Holy Mass can we imitate the saints and fulfill the greatest of all commandments, that of Loving God first and out of love for Him, loving our neighbor as our self. Only then will they, the poorest of the poor, that is those who do not know God loves them, only then will they see Jesus in our eyes and in our smile. Our Lady of adoration, Mother of the Holy Eucharist and our Mother, help us to adore the Father, in Spirit and in Truth. Amen.

Ultimately to give to God what is God's means to give Him ourselves, for we are His and to Him we belong and are called to return; may we indeed be counted among those he has chosen and be instruments of salvations for others as well. Amen

Matthew 22, 15,21 Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time. October 18th, 2014

Today’s Gospel brings out the darkness of the hearts of those who opposed Jesus’ intrusion into their lives—they were religious in appearance only, but in their hearts they sought to live a life far apart from God—they refused to give to God what belonged to Him, namely their lives, their hearts and wills; in other words they refuse to adore Him, they refused to accept Him and his teachings and open their lives to His Divine Grace in order to begin to conform their lives in obedience to His Truth and His Will. And so, in order to justify themselves and to trap Jesus, these so-called religious pose a very clever question to try to get Jesus either to oppose the rights of God or the rights of the state.

In response, Jesus gives His enemies a very clever and profound answer, an answer that goes far beyond their twisted expectations. He doesn’t just give them a yes or no answer, He gives them the true perspective—“Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. In other words, Jesus teaches them and us the proper relationship between church and state, and of our obligation to support both the Church and the state. Jesus puts back into order what was out of order. First and foremost, Jesus taught the Herodians and all those who were listening, that God is first, then the state.

Today then, Jesus teaches us that the state does not enjoy absolute power and dominion, absolute separation from God and His Church. Yes it has its own sphere of dominion, but it is limited. As a consequence, the rights of the state cannot usurp the rights of God and of His Holy Catholic Church, nor go against the dignity and sacredness of the human person created in the image and likeness of God. The government is called to uphold the proper order between Creator and creature.

Yes, us Christians have a duty to give to the state whatever material and personal services we are able in order to support the common good. But the state then has the corresponding responsibility to enact laws and govern with the greatest respect for the common good of all people including, and most especially, the most vulnerable; that is, those that cannot protect themselves. This obligation of the state includes the protection of the life of the human person from the moment of conception to natural death, the defense of the family; and consequently, the protection of marriage as an in-dissolvable union between one man and one woman as define by God and by natural law as a means to bring new life into the world to adore God. The state must protect the rights of parents, not the state, to be the primary educators of their children. The obligation of the state extends as well to the protection of religious liberty, which is the freedom of the human person to worship his Creator God and follow God’s laws and the Teachings of His Church. And so, the laws of the state, if they are to be just, can never contradict the Laws of God. Instead, the principles of God and the sacredness of the human person and the life of the human person should be the guiding light for the enactment of the laws of state.

So we must support the state so it can fulfill its earthly natural purpose or end--which is domestic peace and harmony, and only when it has these ends in view; but even more so, Jesus points out today as well, our higher obligation to support the Church so that it may carry out its supernatural purpose or end: which is to bring about eternal peace and harmony-better known as the kingdom of God, that kingdom for which man was created and for which he is to be saved. Politics alone cannot save society or man;Politics is meant to serve the human person not define him or her.

All of this points out very clearly what Christ does not mean by this verse, “give to Caesar what belong to Caesar and to God what belongs to God,” Christ doesn’t, does not, mean that we relegate our service to God, that is our faith to the private sphere. Christ did not intend to relegate religion to a private affair only carried out in the temple, but not in daily life in the world, as if the world could somehow develop apart from God’s law and Christian law and morality. Of course, that is an illusion; as we have said, the world trying to go along without God’s law is doomed to failure and collapse—God is God, He pervades the entire world—it is His and without Him it cannot exist. Religion is the necessary element that forms the consciences of citizens and brings about the “creation of an ethical consensus in society” (Pope Benedict). Religion is the conscience of a country and faithful Catholics are it’s soul, it fact they are the anima mundi—the soul of the world!

By the way, the political debate should be the means, the method we use to ensure God’s law is respected and human life is protected; and this is why we are obliged to promote the truth and fight unjust laws-laws which go against the common good of all. Like paying taxes, this is a duty we Christians owe to the state. The notion that we Christians should not and may not participate in the public forum and make our voices known is to exclude God Himself from the public square, Ultimately, it is man literally ignoring the existence of God, at its heart this is what communism and secularism does. In the words of the Second Vatican it is a practical atheism. This includes as well, the ideal that we can not use the pulpit to call the state to task and remind it of its obligations to the human person and to God; this ideal of silencing the pulpit is evil, not to mention un-American.

Every Christian, each one of us is called and challenged to be light and salt in the middle of the world. We are all called to love God, have an intimate and loving prayer with Him through prayer, study, and the Sacraments. And because of this love, we are call to go live our mission; to take the truth about God and man, and the truth about God’s love for man, out into the public arena, to all our neighbors. We are called to live as children of God in order to bring his light, his truth and his way into the halls of our schools, of our governments, our jobs as well as in the living rooms of our friends, and yes, a resounding yes, into the voting booth.

Ite missa est!!!, Not the Mass is ended go in peace, but go forth, fulfill your mission from God, take what you have received in the Holy Eucharist, namely Jesus, the God who is Love, and through Him, with Him and in Him, transform the world in which you live and work, transform it through Love. By our holiness of life, and with God’s love in us, we can transform the world, we can make it more humane, more human, changing our current culture of death into a culture of light and life, then and only then will we have peace and security.

Us Catholics Christians truly do have the answer for our modern age’s terrible moral and religious void and consequently its spiritual darkness, which is the very source of its current woes. Let us with the help of the blessed Virgin Mary mother of all nations, give unto God what belongs to God, our obedience to his truth in love and our entire life and everything in it for His honor and glory. Let us ask her to help us to pray in order to make reparation for the exclusion of God and His truth from our society. Ultimately to give to God what is God's means to give Him ourselves, for we are His and to Him we belong and are called to return; may we indeed be counted among those he has chosen and be instruments of salvations for others as well. Amen.

By your humble words, “Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.” “Let it be done to me according to Thy Word,” the Word became flesh and dwelt and continues to dwell among us in the Holy Eucharist…may your words become our own. Amen.

Matthew 22,1-14. Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time. October 12th, 2014

The Holy Spirit in our first reading describes the intimacy to which God calls each one of us. It is as a great feast, a banquet of rich food, a banquet of fine wines, of food rich and juicy…The food that is prepared by the Lord for us however, is not just any food, but the food for which every human heart longs and desires; it is the only food that will ultimately satisfy the human heart. The great feast is really the Heavenly Wedding Feast for which all are invited but sadly in the end few respond.

What is the food the human heart longs for, the food that is served at the Heavenly Wedding Feast? It is the love of God; this is the only food that can satisfy. But we have to stop here before we go further. God does not have love; God does not possess love…God IS LOVE! As St. John tells us, Deus Caritas Est…God is LOVE! This means what the human heart ultimately longs for…every human heart…is God Himself. This brings up an important point that we can never hear enough.

God doesn’t just want to give us something, God wants to give us Some One…God wants to give us Himself, totally, and He is the God who is Love. In fact, God wants to actually wed our soul; He wants to make our souls one with Himself in the Wedding of all weddings, the wedding of the Bridegroom, Jesus who is God come to earth, to His bride, the Church, each one of us, the baptized.

Jesus, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity came to earth and continues to come to earth in order to wed our souls to His, our nature to His Nature. This is why He took an human nature, to be able to invite us to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb…This why He continues to take on a human nature in the Holy Eucharist so that at His wedding Feast the soul and God can become one…one in a union of love…one in a union with the God who is Love Itself. Imagine!, God wants to wed your soul…so much does He love you.

And so by your baptism you are called, invited, to this Wedding Feast that our Gospel today talks about. Where is this wedding Feast???…It is here at the Holy Mass. The Holy Mass is THE WEDDING, the wedding of all weddings; it is the Wedding feast of the Lamb where God wants, desires to wed you and take you to Himself. He is the source of everything, the source of your family, your possessions, your existence…and this God wants to give you something more than all of that, He wants to give you Himself.

The Holy Mass is the mountain of Holiness spoken about in our first reading, the meeting place of God and Man; it is heaven on earth, the Heavenly Wedding Feast on earth. It is where God continues to descend, to condescend to us by becoming one of us, in order to take us to Himself. The choice of all wines is His Precious blood to be poured out for us; the food is His body to be given up for us…By partaking of His flesh and blood, which is united to His soul and divinity, we can, through faith, enter into Comm—union with Him and through Him with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. But it goes without saying that we have to show up at the wedding in order to be wedded to God!

We are told today that many who are invited never show up for the feast; but, we have to do even more than just show up…we have to come with ready to lift up our hearts to the Lord; that is, to offer them up to the Lord who offers His heart to us at Mass…The Holy Mass is an exchange of hearts, and exchange of persons, God gives us His Sacred Heart and we must open our hearts by offering our hearts to Him… How do we do this?

First our hearts have to be made worthy by the Lord Himself in the sacrament of Confession. We have to repent from our sins, confessing them in the sacrament of confession with a firm intention to leave sin behind in order become more fully one with God by following His Holy Will; and so His teachings and Commandments. Our hearts need to be cleansed and our souls dressed in the wedding garment of sanctifying grace, that is with the life of God restored, healed and alive in our souls from a good and honest sacramental confession. We have to come to the Wedding dress worthily. This includes our bodily dress, but most especially in soul. Our outward appearance should be a reflection of our inward appearance, the appearance of our soul before the Bridegroom, Christ. (We should bring Him as well the good works of our lives, and even our failures so He can transform them).

Second we have to realize that at the Wedding that is the Holy Mass, an exchange of hearts must take place. This is done just as it is done at a wedding, vows must take place (I spoke about his during the mini-Eucharistic conference I gave here at St. Peter’s last July). Just like at wedding between a man and woman, the couple exchanges holy and sacred vows…I do…that is I give myself totally to You for life by offering my life to you….These “I do” of the couples must be first and foremost an act of the will, in which each person intends to give the gift of Himself and Herself to one another. And they seal this intention with a Sacred Oath before God Himself and His Holy Church. Amen…so help me God to live this oath till death do us part…if one or more of the couple doesn’t say the words “I do” or doesn’t mean intentionally the words from the heart then the marriage is not valid and the two can not become truly one flesh at the consummation of the wedding vows which takes place in the marital act the night of the wedding.

So too with the Holy Mass…Holy vows must take place, an exchange of hearts, of persons giving of themselves totally in love to one another. God totally gives His “I do” by giving us Himself through the Sacred Heart of His Son in the Holy Eucharist. The Holy Eucharist is the total gift of the Father to us because it is the gift of His Son, Jesus, who is everything that the Father is and possesses. But to receive this gift, we must in response to God’s “I do” give our “I do” that is the gift of our hearts, ourselves, all that we have and are to God. It only then that the consummation truly take place at the Marital act of the Holy Mass, Holy Communion.

We can only truly become one with God at Holy Communion to the extent that we give our “I do” to God…only to the extent we give the gift of our self in response to the gift of God’s entire self can we become “one flesh” with God through the reception of the flesh of God which we receive in Holy Communion. Only communion is far more intimate, unfathomably more intimate than the marital act between a husband and wife because in Holy Communion Jesus whole Body and all of His Blood comes into ours, along with whole Soul and His Divinity!!!

And finally, third, to actively, fully, consciously participate at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb and so bear the fruit of Holiness that is oneness with God, we have to turn to the mother of the Bridegroom-Jesus. We have to turn to the Blessed Mother of God to help us to offer our hearts. Interiorly at every Mass, we should ask her to help us adore the Lord, which really means to make of our selves a living oblation of love to Him.

We turn to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which is already perfectly one with the Sacred Heart of Her Son, and we entrust the offering of our hearts, our whole being into her hands. We ask her to place our hearts on the paten. In fact her hands become the living paten on which our hearts are offered up to the Father by the Hands of Her Son who is working in the person of the priest. She then magnifies the offering of our hearts, our lives, our works, joys and sufferings, our everything, by her Holiness and makes them acceptable to Her Son. He then accepts our hearts and our offerings as if they where His Mother’s own. As the great High priest Jesus then presents them as an acceptable offering to His Father, God the Father almighty who accepts our offerings as if they were Jesus own offerings. Our Father God then takes us to himself and Makes us more and more images and instruments of His love and Mercy for others—images of His Son.

With our hearts acceptable to the Father they become worthy to receive the heart of His Son Jesus in Holy Communion because by the power of the Holy Spirit that are transformed into images of Jesus’ own Sacred Heart. The fruit of this worthy reception of the Heart of the Son, which is the Marital act of the Holy Mass, is oneness with Jesus and through Him with the Father. Jesus then begins to live anew in the world in us, through us and with us. Our works become Jesus works, our acts of selfless love no matter how small become Jesus’s own acts of love. Our lives then bear the fruit of love which is oneness with Love Himself and this love effects not only our own lives, and our family’s lives, but the lives or countless of other souls as well. This is the fruit, the fruit of small souls living holiness; that is, oneness with God. It is these souls who accept the invitation to the wedding feast of the Lamb who will bring about our renewal of our families, our country and our world…they will be used by our Blessed Lord to bring a great renewal of the Church, and so of the world leading to an unprecedented era of peace through the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of His Mother.

Let us then end by turning to the blessed Mother for help. Dear Blessed Mother at this Holy Mass which is the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, help us to give our “I do” to the Lord as did you. By your humble words, “Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.” “Let it be done to me according to Thy Word,” the Word became flesh and dwelt and continues to dwell among us in the Holy Eucharist…may your words become our own. Amen.

This week is Respect-Life Sunday and it kicks off an entire month of support for the Pro-life moment. Our first reading and Gospel talk again about the vineyard of the Lord, and the fact that those to whom the vineyard was entrusted did not properly respond to the Lord or yield fruit for which he was looking. Instead they broke his covenant, creating a culture of death, by killing his prophets and eventually even his Son. Finally, they had the vineyard taken away from them for bearing no fruit, of the fruit of life. We too will all have to give an account of how we used what God has given us in the vineyard to produce good fruit. And at the end of our lives Jesus will question us about fruit of love. Did we use what we have primary for love of God and love of neighbor.

I believe included in this question of our love will be the question of pro-life. How even more so we will have to give an account of our efforts to support the Church’s work of protecting God’s greatest gift--the gift of life. Jesus will say to each one of us who lived in the current culture of death, “What did you do to defend life in my vineyard? I speak for myself but at this point in my life I will have to answer, “not enough Lord, not enough!” God has entrusted the life of every individual to his or her fellow human beings, brothers and sisters. We are to give of ourselves to each other in imitation of Christ who gave Himself totally to us. God asks us to bear fruits of life rather than to abuse our freedom with perversions of “choice” that end up taking life.

To work in the vineyard of the Lord means to stand for life and ‘to stand for’ means that we stand against whatever destroys life. And there is nothing in our society that destroys more human life than abortion—nothing at all, no crime, no disease, no natural disaster, no war. If you look at all the wars that we have ever fought in our nation’s entire history, you will see that we destroy more human lives by abortion in one year than we have destroyed by all the wars of our nation’s history put together. There’s an abortion in our country every 26 seconds, 3,300 a day.

The irony of this horror is that some promote this taking of human life under the slogan “freedom of choice”. But the women getting the abortions do not do so because of freedom of choice; they do so because they feel that there is no freedom and no choice. They feel trapped, abandoned, desperate, afraid…and sadly they feel that there is no one they can turn except the abortionist, who makes money, lots of money off their desperate situation.

The Church and the pro-life movement want to give you the “good news” that there are people ready to help, that there are better choices better than abortion. People are ready to provide help. Let us allow no one ever to feel that the only way to solve a problem is to have her child destroyed. As a country, as a people, we can do better than the destruction of 3300 children a day.

The sad thing is that so many who need this help don’t know it’s available. But that’s where we come in. Each of us can save someone’s life by spreading the Good News that there are alternatives to abortion. Over the next few weeks we are going share with you this and other information. Next week we will have in the bulletin, 55 practical suggestions of legal, peaceful, effective things that we can all do to help bring and end to abortion and help women in need. And at the top of this sheet you will find telephone numbers that can be called anytime of the day or night. There are children who are depending on us to do something. Children are alive today because churches just like ours learned what they could do and began to speak up when they had the chance by saying, “Don’t have an abortion…There’s help available!”

We also need to let people know that to oppose abortion does not mean to oppose those who have had them. To be pro-life means to be pro-woman. To love the baby does not mean we forget the mothers. We can love them both, protect them both, welcome and care for the both. We need to reach out to women who have had abortions. We need to let them know the doors of the church are open to you, the doors of God’s mercy is available to you. God is not and we are not against you; we’re on your side. There is a true case of a woman who had 24 abortions and even for her the doors of the Church are open. Open as well is Christ’s heart of divine Mercy!

It is also urgent that in our day we avoid being fooled by the slogans of our day, which are nothing more than lies. Some people talk about “safe and legal abortions” because they think that making it legal has made it safe and therefore to keep it safe and out of the back ally ways, we must keep it legal. This is a lie. First of all, safe for whom? It’s never safe for the child. The very purpose of the procedure is to destroy the child.

But what many people don’t realize about this lie is that it isn’t safe for the mother either. And that’s true not only because of the over 150 physical and emotional complications that can result from this procedure—But also, because legal abortion facilities in our country are the most unregulated surgical facilities in the nation. Women are injured, even killed and these things are being covered up; we are just not hearing about them. I personally have had many mothers share with me the pain and agony of their decision. They are devastated by the mistake they made. So often they struggle not with the fact that God can forgive them, they struggle instead to forgive themselves.

And what about the lie of the slogan “pro-choice.” The problem about this lie is that we don’t hear what the choice is. Is a particular choice right or wrong, good or bad, should it be allowed or prohibited? Doesn’t this slogan depend on what you’re choosing? Do I have the right to choose to steal from you, to abuse you, to kill you? Of course not—because my choices ends where your rights begin. And therefore the law protects (or should protect) your rights against my choice to harm you.
In abortion what is the choice? Some say it’s the choice whether to have or not have a child.

Certainly everyone one has a choice whether or not to have a child. We can all understand that there are circumstances in which some people should not have a child. But isn’t there a big difference between the choice of whether or not to have a child and the choice of whether or not to kill a child. When we talk about abortion, we are not talking about a child who might come into the world; we are talking about a child who is already in the world. Scientifically, life begins at the moment of conception and we were all embryos once, every one of us. So the question is not, “Should I bring a child into this world?” The question is, “May I throw a child out of the world?” And the answer is no!

Some people will say abortion isn’t my business. But as I said at the beginning, Love is our business, again when we face Jesus we will all be questioned about Love. Doesn’t love mean that when we can help another person in need or in danger we try to help them or at least speak up for them. If we witness a helpless child who is about to be run over by a car or is in danger of being abused by an adult, don’t we have a duty to intervene, a duty of love? What more helpless child is there than the child in danger of being aborted? He or she is the most helpless child in our world—is it not our business and duty to intervene?

In a short while we will offer ourselves at the Sacrifice of the Mass. Christ gives Himself away on the cross and, in the Holy Eucharist we find the meaning of love: I sacrifice myself for the good of the other person, I lay down my life for him. Isn’t it ironic that this is the perfect reversal of abortion and all crimes against life, which say instead, I sacrifice the other person for the good of myself? And isn’t it ironic, that the very same words that Jesus and His priests use to proclaim love, are used by the defenders of abortion: This is my body. Some say they control their bodies and so others must die; But Christ says, “This is my body given up for you in the Holy Eucharist, so that you may live.” Jesus gives His Body away, so others may live. This is my body, given up for you. In the power of these words, the culture of death will be transformed into the culture of life.

As we receive the fruit of these words, the Holy Eucharist-Jesus himself given up for us so that we may live, let us pray for openness to His power so that we may not be indifferent. Let us pray that we may have the grace to get actively involved in the effort to stop the killing of all children by not only abortion, but by all crimes against life. Holy Mary, Mother of Life, Mother of all mothers, and mother of the unborn, pray for us.