Homily
Sunday, July 27, 2008, 11th Sunday after Pentecost on the Tridentine Liturgical Calendar
Assumption Grotto Parish, Detroit
St. Paul, Apostle of Tradition
I rejoice to have returned back safe and sound from World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney Australia with our illustrious Pope Benedict XVI. One of our teenage parishioners stated to me upon our return, “Fr. Ward, you made it back with 38 teenagers; it’s amazing you’re still alive.” I reminded him, “I made it back with all of you, it’s amazing you’re still alive.” Yet the reward for our pilgrimage, with its hours of prayer each day, amid many activities and exhausting schedules, cannot be measured by whether we survived, or how healthy we remained in the flesh, but rather, on the degree of our increase of holiness of life. The one criteria of all my work with young people is this: whether they grow in holiness. On that score, our pilgrimage was a brilliant success, to the praise of the Holy Trinity.
I wish to focus the points of my homily today on the reading of St. Paul, from 1 Cor 15. He says much to the point of Sacred Tradition. I focus on St. Paul for the simple reason that this is the Holy Year of St. Paul, which began on 29 June of this year, and will extend to the same date next year. From this November to next May, on Thursday evenings, I will provide a short lecture with questions and answers on the topic of this Holy Year, briefly surveying the life and travels of St. Paul, and then analyzing each one of his letters. During my homilies this year I will be prejudiced towards commenting on every passage from his letters which may surface in the liturgy.
During World Youth Day, the young parishioners of Assumption Grotto and I had the opportunity to extend the liturgical tradition of the Roman Church to the youth in attendance. After months of diplomacy and negotiations, I had arranged that our pilgrims, the Trailblazers, would attend St. Patrick Parish, whose fine pastor is Fr. Walsh; and on our last day together at that parish, we would celebrate publicly the Tridentine Mass. I knew the youth would be exposed to many liturgical experiences, some strange to them such as the Melkites, and some, frankly, liturgical abuses. In 2008, sadly, that can hardly be avoided, as you yourselves experience in some of the parishes nearer to your own homes; add to this, the fact that more than a half million pilgrims came from all around the world. So as an antidote to this, I go on the WYD pilgrimages, to put my foot down on liturgical law wherever possible, and also, this year, to provide the experience of the Tridentine Mass.
The Assumption Grotto altar boys, who were with Trailblazers in Sydney, provided the altar service, but not alone; another two priests from Oxford, England, fine priests indeed, had also sought out Fr. Walsh’s parish, and their boys from Oxford were also highly trained in all things Tridentine. They experienced a sort of brotherhood, I think, because of their common love for and familiarity with the Tridentine Mass. The young ladies of our parish prepared several pieces of beautiful Latin Polyphony. And so on Saturday Morning, hundreds of young people from the USA, England, Hong Kong and Switzerland were in attendance for the solemn high Tridentine Mass with priest, deacon and sub-deacon, to the amazement and edification of all. And in a later parish during our travels, the pastor would continually select the Assumption Grotto altar boys to serve at Mass, complimenting them on their knowledge of the Mass, exemplary conduct, capacity to anticipate needs, and enthusiasm for the Holy Sacrifice.
Great is the Church when there is a staunch adherence to tradition, both that which is called “Sacred Tradition,” meaning that part of the Church’s doctrine and deposit of the faith which is not in Sacred Scripture; and also that tradition which is the liturgical tradition and patrimony of the worship of the Church, organically developed from the time of the Apostles to the present, even if nearly aborted after Vatican II. (Notice, I say “after” Vatican II, not “during” or “because of” Vatican II.)
St. Paul exhorts the faithful to adhere to Sacred Tradition (1 Cor 15:1-10). He “reminds” them of “the Gospel which I preached.” This means that St. Paul, before he, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, wrote this letter which we consider Word of the Holy Spirit and part of the Holy Bible, obliged them to adhere, with equal faith, to that which he told them in a way not written down.
Here he offers a profession of faith, “Christ died for our sins, according the scriptures… and that he was raised up the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,” providing six important witnesses of the resurrection: Peter, the Twelve, five hundred brethren at once, James (a vision not recorded elsewhere in scripture), to “all the Apostles” (perhaps referring to the apparition at the Ascension), and to Paul himself.
Two important challenges to the Corinthian mind appear here. First, the Greeks had laughed at Paul because he professed the resurrection (cf. Acts 17:32). Greek mythology and philosophy had disposed that people to embrace the immortality of the soul, but the resurrection of the flesh was too much for most of them. Second, he keeps appealing to the scriptures “…according to the scriptures, …according to the scriptures” (vv. 4 and 5), yet these were not the Greek scriptures, such as Homer’s Iliad and Odessy, the writings of Demosthenes or Plato or Isocrates. He expected these non-Jews to take just as seriously the word of God in the Jewish scriptures. This can only be explained because he had taught them already, and now held them to the oral teachings he provided.
Then he says, “I am the least of the Apostles,… seeing that I persecuted the Church of God.” It was “by God’s grace” that he came to believe in Jesus Christ, and his faith was his salvation, and the salvation of all these other souls in Corinth to whom he was now writing. The juxtaposition of tradition and persecution sheds light on something here: that persecution of Catholicism is essentially the effort to separate one or more souls, by varying degrees and modes of violence, from that faith which they received from the tradition of the Catholic Church. Persecution and Tradition stand as enemies. Hence St. Paul’s exhortation at the beginning of this passage to the Gospel “which I (St. Paul) preached, which ye also received, and in which ye stand firm, by which also ye shall be saved, if ye hold fast to it in the form in which I preached it.”
Let us adhere, then to the tradition of the Catholic Church, both doctrinal and liturgical, not to say also devotional, mystical, moral, canonical and all the rest, even to the point of suffering and death. For aid in this enterprise, let us turn to the powerful and loving intercession of our Mother in Heaven. Amen.