May 26, 2002

The month of May has been a time of shining grace in the life of the parish. Various events came together to make a festival time of it. The many weekday activities and visitors from near and far and joyous baptisms and weddings, the May Crowning on the 5th, the blessing of the Tabernacle on the 12th, and the Confirmation and First Communions on the 19th, will be engraved in our memories for a long time.

As our nation is at war, and as heavy distress rattles the earthly part of our Holy Church, this is the right time to do the best for God, beginning at his altar and in the confessionals. During the years that Oliver Cromwell was despoiling parish churches in the seventeenth century, a baronet named Sir Robert Shirley built a church and paid for its decoration, though to do so was politically dangerous. His memorial tablet says that in a time when all things were being profaned, it was his singular praise to do the best of things in the worst of times.

Remembering how our Lord said that where your treasure is there will be your heart also, it is with profound and humble thanks that we notice the spontaneous generosity with which our people have gone beyond the goal of the Cardinal's Appeal. The first apostles knew that money matters are an essential part of the sacramental life, for faith without works is dead. But works without faith are not only dead but deadening: destroying the very sense of why we are Christians. I am moved by the fact that, while I never mentioned the Appeal in a formal way in preaching, your response has put our parish in the top rank of those in the archdiocese in prompt and munificent response.

Our Lord is moving us to do his works because he has a plan for us. As we pay off our mortgage and undertake the necessary repairs included in the parish restoration program, we will be able to switch into a new gear in parish life.

All that we do we offer this Trinity Sunday to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Those who have recently come to Christ in the sacraments now can do him practical service in many ways. Likewise, bitter critics in our culture who attack the Catholic Faith, show by their anger that they are compelled by the Church, and such people could some day become saints, like Saul of Tarsus. In all things, we should invoke the prayer to God in the Book of Wisdom (11:25-26) "How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved? You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord who loves the living."

Fr. George W. Rutler