New Page 1

The Good Shepherd, and Every Priest, Must Die for Love of Others

Homily

Sunday, May 7, 4th Sunday of Easter, Good Shepherd or Vocations Sunday

What a great joy it is for the parish to once again receive our alumni in this magnificent Temple to the one true God, the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Many of you have come from afar, and with great personal effort, to join us on this morning for the Eucharistic sacrifice. The Eucharist is, in fact, the center of all of our lives, the center of this parish, and the source and wellspring of all that we can find in the Church.

We also rejoice in what the universal Church is celebrating today, Good Shepherd Sunday, which is also Vocations Sunday. Perhaps in many of your current home parishes there have been initiatives organized for today, for this afternoon, to promote vocations to the priesthood and religious life.

With the recent clustering, closing and merging of parishes, we keep returning to the reality that the Catholic Church needs priests; that we Catholics love our priests, who have dedicated their entire lives to intercede for us, to make sacrifices for us, to offer us the sacraments, to teach us the Gospel, and to govern all the details of parish life. Without priests, the Church suffers. We need to encourage Catholics to have children, many children, and to encourage their sons to be priests and religious, and to encourage their daughters to religious life and the path of consecrated virginity. For the Church is under attack by the powers of hell, and Satan’s first tactic focuses on the sacrament of the priesthood: he wants to destroy it, he wants to corrupt priests, he wants them to be apostles of sin instead of apostles of grace, and so ruin many souls and mock our loving God.

No one be discouraged: since the late eighties, that’s more than twenty years in a row, we have an increasing number of men who are entering the seminary, and the numbers of priests has grown year after year without exception. Therefore we see that in the world there are enough priests to compensate, and even more than compensate, for the lack of numbers of priestly vocations in America.

Someone recently told me, “Father, to get more priests, we have to tell young men that they can, well, have a drink like everyone else, enjoy the popular diversions and recreation like everyone else, that the priesthood is fun and comfortable.” So I answered, “That’s what they’ve been saying to the American vocations since the 50’s, and look at the results: the seminaries are empty, and huge numbers of our priests are in jail. The dioceses and religious orders that show growth are the ones that are ‘strict’ by popular standards, that adhere to the Church’s teachings, discipline and traditions with a profound spirit of faith. Abdicating to sensuality is not the solution.”

There is a theological reason that this assertion of mine is true: a priest acts in the person of Christ in different manners a different times, and God acts through his priests, even sinful ones, in special ways. For a priest is another Christ, that’s the definition of the priesthood. We define a priest not by an idea, or an ideology, or a cause, or an agenda. We define the priesthood by a person, who is the Son of God who took flesh from the Virgin Mary.

What does Jesus say about himself? Whatever he says, goes for priests, too. He says, “I am the good shepherd, I know mine and mine know me… a good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” A good priest therefore knows his faithful, and they know him, and he lays down his life for them. And I tell you from my own experience: often the very people for whom a priest lays down his life, are the very ones that slander him, attack him, criticize him behind his back, get him removed from parishes… it is often the sheep who crucify the shepherd. But this is the way it has to be, for so it was with Christ.

To promote vocations, therefore, we have to promote the person of Jesus Christ. We have to promote the beauty of sacrificing your life for others, even ungrateful others. We need to start with Christ once again, whom we have put aside, thinking that the world had a better plan than Catholicism did. We have to remember that Jesus is the only salvation.

And I as a priest continually encourage the faithful to welcome the priests here, Fr. Mark and I, into your lives. What a pity, that we don’t have more priests, so that each of you could be known and cared for with more attention and more love than now, the love that you deserve in Christ from your priests. I’m always so grateful when parishioners strive to establish a friendly relationship with a priest, for such helps priests live out their vocation to know the sheep, and to lay down their lives loving their faithful brothers and sisters in the very name of God.

It is in this same vein that I encourage the alumni to not be strangers to St. Joseph’s. This is a parish where we love one another, for that’s the commandment of the Lord. Our unity is found in the Eucharist, and that is an eternal and unshakable foundation of unity. And here we love our alumni for passing on to us this worthy Church for the celebration of the sacraments and for prayer, and for continuing to help sustain this poor parish in its many needs.

On this Good Shepherd Sunday, on this Vocation’s Sunday, here with our alumni, let’s all make a promise: let’s keep building up the Church, which is the mystical body of Christ. Let’s make a promise to help the Church most especially by encouraging boys, adolescents, young men, to follow Jesus Christ, not to follow the demands of worldly comforts, for Jesus is the true Good Shepherd, who will lead new vocations courageously and selflessly up the royal road of the cross, out of love of God above all things and love of neighbor as himself.