USEFUL WISDOM FOR 2024 #49

 

MY NEW BOOK FOR BISHOPS, PRIESTS AND SEMINARIANS

Cover Photo - The Bishop and Presbyterate of the Diocese of Ogdensburg, New York

AVAILABLE ON "AMAZON BOOKS" IN A FEW DAYS

 

INTRODUCTION 

This is a collection of live presentations, published magazine articles and addresses to specific groups, presented and written over several years. I decided to publish them in their original form as they were written and presented at the time, rather than trying to update them as if they were written as part of an academic cohesive whole which is evidenced by some repetition of the presented matter. 

In June of 2001, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops published their book  “The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests” as a follow-up to Pope John Paul II’s 1992 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation “I Will Give You Shepherds.” 

During that time, I was the Vocation Director for the Archdiocese of Louisville from 1998-2003. I was very much influenced by both books – to the point that I practically had them memorized or at least heavily marked up. 

While I was Vocation Director, I was influenced so much by the USCCB’s “The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests” that when I was invited by the monks of Saint Meinrad Archabbey to address the whole community during a Day of Prayer on any topic I chose related to vocations, I chose to talk about Chapter Three of The Basic Plan, “The Ongoing Formation of an Entire Presbyterate.” I focused especially on this quote at the end of the book: “To pursue the ongoing formation not simply of priests, but of a presbyterate as a whole, brings us to new territory. The corporate sense of priestly identity and mission, although not fully developed even in official documents, is clearly emerging as an important direction for the future.” This quote gave me my direction for the future. 

In my two presentations, entitled “A Modest Proposal,” I asked the monks to consider adding a post-ordination ongoing formation program as serious and focused as the initial formation of their seminary. At that time, both the seminary and most dioceses were offering haphazard, hit and miss, stand-alone, often repetitious, day-long programs.  

The monks thought it was a great idea, but they said they did not have the funds for such an ambitious program. A year or two later, as I was finishing my stint as our archdiocesan Vocation Director, the Lilly Endowment announced their “Making Connections” grants. hearing of my “modest Proposal” to the monks of Saint Meinrad Archabbey, they invited us to apply for one of those grants. We ended getting an almost $2,000,000.00 grant. 

At the end of my term as Archdiocesan Vocation Director, and right before the monks hired me to develop the grant application, I wrote a small book in 2004 entitled “Intentional Presbyterates: Claiming Our Common Sense of Purpose as Diocesan Priests.” I simply gathered as much material as I could find about “presbyterates” from church documents and published articles and put it in that little book. 

With funds from our Lilly Endowment grant, we mailed out free copies of that book to every bishop in this country and Canada. many bishops followed up with orders of multiple copies to give to their priests as Christmas presents. It has been re-printed several times and has even been translated into a couple of languages (Spanish, Vietnamese and Swahili). 

Bishop Edward Burns of the Diocese of Dallas, when he was a priest serving as the Executive Director of the Secretariat for Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations at the USCCB in Washington, D.C. from 1999-2008,sent me a note saying that “the title of your book itself has captured the imagination of priests and bishops across the country.” 

When Saint Meinrad Seminary received the large “Making Connections” grant from the Lilly Foundation and we started designing our new ongoing formation program for priests, I was adamant that it be called “The Institute for Priests and Presbyterates” so that it clearly included not only the formation of individual priests after seminary, but the ongoing formation of presbyterates as a whole as well. 

For individual priests, I personally developed and taught a pre-ordination “Introduction to Presbyterates” class in Second Theology and “Transition Out of Seminary and Into ministry” class in Fourth Theology in the School of Theology. Our Board of Directors helped design several programs like: “Settling into Priesthood,” “Gearing Up to Be Pastor, “First Pastorates,” “World Priest Program,” “Mini-Sabbaticals,” “A Cruise Retreat for Busy Priest,” “Pre-Retirement” and “Retirement” programs.  

During this time, for presbyterates as a whole, I was committed as part of the grant to design and lead six Presbyteral Convocations in several American dioceses. In all, I designed two Presbyteral Convocation models: Intentional Presbyterates I: “Made Holy by Our Shared Ministry” and Intentional Presbyterates II: “Claiming Our Responsible Freedom as Individual Priests.” I presented well over 100 of these convocations in dioceses in ten different countries: all over the US and Canada (sometimes returning to do both models), as well as Europe and the Caribbean. I was so busy in those days that I turned down invitations to India, Nigeria, Singapore and Tonga in the Pacific region. 

During this time, in 2011, I put together another book entitled “A Bishop and his Priests Together.” It contained my own reflections as well as the reflections of several US bishops. Complimentary copies of this books were mailed out to bishops, mostly those in English speaking countries, around the world. I was also invited to address the body of USCCB Bishops at their spring meeting in Florida (2007) and the Bishops of the Antilles Bishops’ Conference in Trinidad (2016) on the subject of how bishops could build more unified presbyterates. 

Retired now, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to offer, in print, many of the presentations and published articles that I wrote on presbyteral unity over the years and put them in one book for those who might be interested and find them useful even today.

A "BLUE" CHRISTMAS MESSAGE

A Pretty Messy Event

ORIGINALLY GIVEN ON CHRISTMAS EVE 2011

Our Lady of the Woods Chapel, Bellarmine University 

When the time came for her to have her child,

she gave birth to him in a barn, wrapped him up

and laid him in a feeding trough for animals.

Gospel of Luke  2:1-14

If you read the story carefully, the first Christmas was a pretty sad event, even pathetic! If there hadn’t been a census that year, Jesus would have been born at home, in Nazareth, in a warm bed, surrounded by family and friends. If there hadn’t been a census that year, Jesus would have been laid in a new baby-bed, hand crafted by Joseph himself, right there in his own carpenter shop. If there hadn’t been a census that year, one of his aunts would probably have come to stay with Mary a month or two to help her before, during and after her delivery. If there hadn’t been a census that year, neighbors, friends and local Nazareth musicians would have gathered outside the house as the birth drew near, a traditional Jewish practice at that time. If there hadn’t been a census that year, those musicians would have struck up the band and the whole neighborhood would have erupted in singing and dancing when it was announced: “It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” 

For reasons known only to God, it didn’t happen that way! As usual, God had a different idea. Instead, Mary came due at the very same time that Joseph was required by law to register in a rotating, fourteen-year Roman census. Because of that census requirement, a very pregnant Mary and a very worried Joseph were required to pack their bags and travel 80 miles, across country, on donkey-back, to Joseph’s ancestral town of Bethlehem. All this happened so that the foreign government occupying their country could have a better headcount to collect their taxes. Away from home, with labor pains coming on and unable to find a place to stay, this scared and exhausted young couple took refuge in a barn. Mary delivered her baby, right there in the barn, using an animal’s feedbox for his bed. How pitiful can you get!

Luke, the writer of this narrative, knew that if this birth had taken place at home, things would have been very different, but here he is telling us that the Savior of the world was born in the most desperate of situations. Looking at all this through the eyes of faith, Luke paints a pathetic picture and then heaven wrapping it up in wings of love. Shepherds take the place of celebrating neighbors and family members back home in Nazareth. Singing angels fill in for local musicians. Luke turns this pathetic situation into a heavenly event. In his story, he shows us God kissing the whole earth and every human being on it.

We know all the details of the Christmas story quite well, but do we know the point of this story? Do we understand what it means? Luke is not merely reporting historical facts here: he is making a religious point. He is telling us that by sending his Son, Jesus, into the world in this strange way, God is saying to us that he wants to be intimately involved in our lives, even in the most pathetic and unlikely situations, even when things seem hopeless and even when God seems absent. By sending his Son, Jesus, into the world in this way, God is saying that he loves us, all of us, including the weakest and most vulnerable of us, even those of us the world considers worthless. 

The story, of course, does not end here. The Christmas story is just one part of a much longer love story. This God-child grew up and preached the ongoing reconciliation of heaven and earth. This Jesus revealed the soft-spot in God’s heart for the marginalized of society – the poor, the sick and the suffering – and gave them a sense of their own dignity, no matter how desperate their situations. 

What does this incredibly loving God want from us for all this? What kind of response does God want to his incredible incarnation? In a nutshell, God wants to be involved in our lives in an intimate way. God wants nothing less than a love relationship. He wants to shower us with love and he wants us to love him back by trusting him, especially in time of doubt and sorrow. No matter how much we have been through, he wants us to know that he has “been there and done that” with us and that someday we will understand how it all fits together! 

My friends, on this Christmas Eve we gather again to celebrate the embrace of an incredibly loving God! So let us realize again tonight that, no matter whom we are, what we’ve done or failed to do, what we’ve been through or what we cannot seem to get over, we are being held right now in the embrace of God’s unconditional love. His name is Emmanuel, which means “God with us!” 

My friends, some of you reeling from incredible losses, some of you are hurting and some of you are sad to the core. I cannot take that away or make it all better this Christmas, but I do hope you know that the first Christmas was not all that merry either! For Mary and Joseph it was a time filled with fear, homesickness and disorientation. Just as the angels wrapped their wings around their pathetic situation, may the angels of God wrap their wings around you and your situation! I don’t know why some people suffer, but I do know that God loves us! In spite of the hard time you may be experiencing, I hope you know down deep that in giving us his Son, he has given us his heart!  

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF BEING BLESSED

 

Elizabeth cried out in a loud voice and said, "Blessed

 are you among women, Mary. Blessed are you who believed 

that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled."

Luke 1:39-4

Back when I was a young priest, about a hundred years ago or so, while I was associate pastor at St. Mildred Church in Somerset (Kentucky), I designed several large banners for the church. Banners were very popular back in the 1970s. The people seemed to appreciate most of them, but one of them raised more than one old lady's eyebrows. It pictured a very pregnant Mary, sitting in a rocking chair deep in meditation, her arms folded carefully over her swollen abdomen. I was trying to capture the words of the gospel in the Annunciation story: “Mary was deeply troubled by the angel's words and pondered what his greeting meant.” I tried to imagine Mary sitting there in her chair trying to figure out what her surprise pregnancy meant and where her life would lead. After all, she was an unwed mother in the eyes of the Jewish law of her day. Well, the banner was considered a bit blasphemous in the eyes of some of the very pious. l stood my ground and it went up every Advent while I was there. The people finally got used to it and many came to love it.

In the first chapter of Luke, Mary is called “blessed” no fewer than three times, once by the angel Gabriel and twice by her cousin Elizabeth in today’s text. “Blessedness” is not all it’s cracked up to be! It’s certainly not all peaches and cream, not by a long shot. Mary was granted the blessedness of being the mother of the Son of God. Because of the blessedness, her heart was filled with a mixture both joy and sorrow. It was almost as if she could smell a rat! Her blessedness became a sword piercing her heart. It would lead someday to seeing her son hanging on a cross, spit on and despised by a mocking crowd.

To be chosen and blessed by God has its ups and downs. It means great joy and it means great sorrow. Ask anyone who has ever had such a call from God! Ask Peter, Paul, John the Baptist, any of the martyrs, Theresa, Augustine, Joseph, Abraham and Sarah, Jeremiah, Jonah or Isaiah. Ask any of the millions of parents, priests and sisters – anyone who have been called by God for some special task. The raw truth is that God does not “choose” a person for ease and comfort, but to “use” that person for his special designs and purposes. To be “called” by God is a scary adventure. With that honor and privilege comes awesome responsibility. Nowhere can we better see the paradox of “blessedness” than in the life of Mary. She had the joy of being the mother of the Son of God but she also had to face the ridicule of her neighbors, the possibility of being abandoned by Joseph, the disappearance of Jesus for three days when he was a boy, the possibility that he had lost his mind when he was a young rabbi and, finally, his cruel and tortured death when he was a young man.

Mary was “blessed” alright. However, the gospels honor her not so much for her unique and privileged position as “mother” as for her total trust in God no matter what! “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” As the privileged mother we can admire her. As one who totally trusts God, in good times and bad, we can emulate her!

Like Mary’s “blessedness,” this holiday season will, no doubt, be a confusing mixture of joy and sadness. I have heard story after story of happy engagements, heroic generosity, new families being reunited, reconciliations among old enemies, beautiful celebrations and jobs found. I have also heard a lot of sad stories about unemployment, terrible sickness, old people in nursing homes who cannot die, broken marriages, family fights and auto accidents. In fact, for me, being “blessed” by God means being in a position to be able hear and absorb these stories. One minute I will get a letter from a parishioner who tells me how much closer he or she has drawn to God because of a homily I have given or something I have written; the next minute the phone rings telling mg me about a newly discovered cancer or upcoming surgery. One minute I am going to a Christmas party; the next minute l am on my way to a friend's funeral. One morning I am stopped by someone in the street who gushes with compliments about something I have done for them; by midafternoon I get a royal chewing out by someone else for something I have overlooked or forgotten. 

A priest’s life, much like a parent’s life, is often a blessed life and often a pain-filled life. Many of you parents have told me about one of your children who brought you so much joy as a child, but who now brings you so much pain as a young adult with their addictions and bad choices. The life of a priest and the life of a parent can often be very much alike. We can be forced into situations where we laugh one minute and cry the next, all in a day’s time!

Most evenings, when it all quiets down and I am alone with my thoughts, I like to just sit down in a big chair with my journal and wonder what it all means. Some evenings, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Like Mary in her rocking chair in that old Advent banner I designed years ago, I just sit and wonder what it all means and where it will all lead. Like Mary kneeling before the angel Gabriel, I am reminded of words like, “Do not fear,” “God is at work here," "trust God, believe in yourself and dare to dream.”

My friends, on this fourth Sunday of Advent, the church holds Mary up to us as a model of one who has complete trust in God - in good times and in bad, through thick and thin. Somehow, many of us have gotten the impression that problems, pain and disillusionment are signs of God's absence. Mary teaches us that all our confusing mixture of joy and sorrow is actually a sign of “blessedness,” a sign that God is indeed active in our lives and all our troubles can eventually be turned to good.

My friends, don't let Advent go by this year without a few minutes in a rocking chair with Mary, pondering what the events of your life mean. Advent is a time to renew our commitment to trust God no matter what, and patiently wait for insight into what it all means and direction on how to proceed! When we don't have answers is when we need to trust - to trust that God is in charge and that all things will eventually turn out for the good. 

"Blessed are we who have believed that what was spoken to us by the Lord will be fulfilled."