Homily for June 29, 2025
Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul
Triumph of the Church
On the
day that Pope Benedict was elected, many Cardinals came out on the balcony with
him to greet the world. Cardinal George from Chicago was caught on camera
staring at the horizon with a very distant and thoughtful look on his face.
Later, a reporter asked him what he was thinking about, and the Cardinal
responded, “I was there, in the place where Peter was crucified by Nero, but I
realized that I was standing next to the successor of St. Peter, but where was
the successor of Nero? His empire had crumbled and gone, but the Church lives
on.”
God chose two very ordinary men to be the
foundations of His great Church – Peter, the fickle fisherman who denied
Christ; Paul the arrogant tentmaker who, before his conversion, was a
persecutor of Christians. And yet by God’s grace, these two men became the
pillars of the Church – Peter the first Pope, Paul the great evangelist who
wrote most of the New Testament. Clearly this Church is not the brainchild of a
committee or the idea of a wise man – no, it is the work of God alone!
Any
reputable historian, even those without faith, would agree that the Catholic
Church has been the most impactful organization in all of Western Civilization.
It has spread further than any empire, lasted longer than any other
establishment, and brought immeasurable good into the world. I want to focus on
four ways the Catholic Church has changed the world.
First,
it is because of the Catholic Church that we understand the dignity of the
human person. The ancient world was rather cruel – as the philosopher Hobbes
said, the basic life of man is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Women were
property, the poor were seen as accursed and forsaken by God, disabled children
were left out in fields to die…but Christianity had a whole new vision of every
person made in the Image of God. In the year 258, the Emperor Valerian launched
a new persecution of Christians. He had heard that the Church had gold and
silver vessels and priceless works of art, so the emperor captured the deacon
St. Lawrence and gave him three days to turn over all the riches of the Church.
Three days later, Lawrence appeared at the Emperor’s palace and said, “Behold,
the true treasures of the Church!” – and upon opening the door to the palace,
in came the sick, the blind, cripples, the poor. Valerian was not amused and
ordered Lawrence to be executed by being grilled. The saint famously quipped,
as he was being roasted alive, “Turn me over, I’m done on this side.”
But it
was precisely this valuing of human life that set Christians apart from others.
During the great plague of 251, when almost five thousand Romans were dying of
the plague daily, the pagans fled to the hills to save their skins…while the
Christians stayed in the city to nurse the sick, many catching the plague
themselves due to their charity. Here is what an early Church father Dionysius
had to say about it:
Heedless
of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and
ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy
.… Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves
and died in their stead .… The best of our brothers lost their lives in this
manner. The heathen behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset
of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest
[relatives]. You might think that’s just pious talk, but even the pagan
emperor Julian bore witness to it when he wrote: It is disgraceful that the Christians
support not only their own poor but ours as well, but all men see that our
people [who practice the ancient Roman religion] lack aid from us. He was
embarrassed that the Christians took care of both Christians and pagans, while
the pagans didn’t even care for their own!
Which
brings me to the second great glory of Catholicism – we are the largest social
service organization on the planet. But more than just a charity, Christians
serve because we see Jesus in one another. Once a reporter was observing Mother
Teresa taking care of a smelly, dying man, and he said, “I wouldn’t do that for
a million dollars.” Mother Teresa replied, “Neither would I. But I would do it
for the love of Jesus.” No government program, no secular institution, no NGO
is motivated by the love of Jesus. As Mother Teresa said, “Wash the plate not
because it is dirty nor because you are told to wash it, but because you love
the person who will use it next.” It is love that sets Christian charity apart
from a government handout or a philanthropist – and that love has motivated
Christians to do good for the world.
In the
1950s, a young man from Washington DC named Aloysius Schwartz was making a
retreat right before he became a priest. On the retreat, he knelt before a
statue of Our Lady, and promised that he would do anything she ever asked.
After ordination, he began to read about the difficult conditions in Korea
after the Korean war – almost one-half of the adult population was homeless and
unemployed due to the war. He received permission to become a missionary to
Korea. Later he recalled that when he stepped off the train in Busan, he was
not prepared for the vast poverty he saw – people who were literally going
through trash bins trying to find something to eat, children running around
without clothes, their emaciated ribs showing, the sick literally dying in the
streets. He wrote to all his friends back home and begged money, starting an
orphanage and programs for the poor. First in Korea, then the Philippines, then
Mexico – Fr. Schwartz didn’t stop seeing the poor as Christ. Sadly he was
diagnosed with ALS, but he ordered that his tombstone read, “Here lies Fr.
Schwartz, he did his best for Jesus.” About 200,000 children have been saved
from poverty by his Boystown and Girlstown boarding schools, and Fr. Schwartz
is now on the path to sainthood – not because of what he did, but because he
did it for the love of Jesus.
A third
great impact of the Church on the world is that the Church has preserved
learning throughout the centuries. Pretty much any branch of knowledge – from
law to medicine, from philosophy to astronomy to art, the Catholic Church has
been a part of it. For example, did you know that the Big Bang Theory was
actually developed by a Catholic priest, Fr. Georges Lamaitre? Or that the
Vatican owns and operates a state-of-the-art observatory – in Arizona, of all
places? A few years ago, historian Thomas Cahill wrote a famous book called
“How the Irish Saved Civilization”. The thesis is that after the Fall of the
Roman Empire, those doggone illiterate barbarians destroyed books and basically
squelched all education across Europe – but the one place it survived was in
the cold hinterlands of Ireland, where monks faithfully copied the Bible and
other books by hand. Those Catholic monks preserved the light of learning in
the midst of the darkest centuries – as the Church has done for the past 20
centuries!
But the
most important impact of the Church isn’t how it changed the world, because the
goal of the Church is Heaven, not earth. It is said that the Church doesn’t have
a mission, the Church is a mission – the mission to bring all souls into
a relationship with Jesus Christ, and to bring them to Heaven. Those simple,
humble souls who draw near to Jesus in the Eucharist…the many Rosaries prayed
down through the centuries…the great saints, and the many holy people we will
never know in this life…the Church has been a conduit of grace for twenty
centuries. Imperfect, yes…full of sinners, definitely…but still the great place
of encounter with Christ, where His Real Presence resides in the Eucharist, where
His truth is proclaimed unchanged, where we come to know and love our Lord and
are sanctified by His grace.
So what
are our takeaways: first, be proud to be Catholic! We can hear people talk
about all the sinners in the Church, but we can counter that with all the good
that the Church has done. We have every reason to hold our heads high – because
we are a part of the only religion that traces its lineage back to Jesus
Himself, and which will be around until the very end.
Second,
consider how you are called to contribute to this great Mystical Body of
Christ! If you are baptized, you are invited into this mission! What does that
look like? First, live your vocation well – seek holiness as a husband or wife,
mother or father, student or young adult in the world. Second, evangelize – you
too are responsible for the Good News reaching the end of the earth. Third,
make your life abound in those good works for which the Church is rightly
known. Remember that St. Peter and St. Paul were nobodies, too – but God built
the entire Church upon these weak men. God has truly done amazing things
through the Church, His Mystical Body!
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