• You belong to a counter-cultural movement called Traditional Catholicism. But the world at large does not at all share your traditional Catholic faith and in some respects is hostile to it.
• You come here to St. Isidore’s because you want the traditional Catholic faith, the same faith taught by the Apostles and held by Catholics throughout the ages. You come here to be instructed in the same moral law that they followed and to receive the sacraments in the traditional forms that have nourished souls throughout the ages. You come here to put your children in a school where they will be taught and formed in the Catholic faith.
• Then you leave St. Isidore’s and go out into a world permeated by a post-modern pagan, anti-culture. And there is this struggle to maintain a Catholic identity. What you do away from St. Isidore’s is just as important as what you do here for the maintaining of your faith.
• In today’s parable, Our Lord teaches us that we have to be just as prudent in attaining our supernatural goal as the world is in attaining its natural ends. We must be smart in using our material resources which come from God.

• I want to tell you an amazing but true story. It is a story you know well. It is about a Jewish man who claimed to be God 2000 years ago. He chose twelve uneducated men as His disciples. After teaching them for three years, He commanded them to go throughout the entire world preaching the message that He had given them.
• They accomplished this command with incredible success. Over a period of 1000 years, they and their followers built a new civilization called Christendom, a civilization greater than has ever been known in the history of man.
• But the native peoples in North and South America, as well as in Asia, had to wait many centuries before the message of Our Lord Jesus Christ was preached to them. Catholic missionaries did not even know that these places existed until the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Magellan. As soon as they knew they existed, they went there.
• In Korea, where Fr. Kim is from, it was not until the early 1600s that Catholicism arrived and it was brought there by a layman. Now, 400 years later, thanks to the efforts of the missionaries, 11% of the population of South Korea is Catholic.
• Why has there been all of this urgency, throughout the centuries, to bring the Catholic faith to the various nations? Because it is a matter of life and death, eternal life and eternal death. Our Lord said that those who believed and were baptized would be saved while those who did not believe would be condemned. And when He said condemned, He meant condemned to Hell.
• This is often what motivates souls to pursue a priestly or religious vocation. They realize that the main drama in this life is about the eternal destiny of souls. They realize that the real success after this life is over is going to be the salvation of souls.

Holy Mother Church dedicates this Sunday to the capital vice of anger. Let us look at three different types of sinful anger and then a story that illustrates a Catholic view on anger.

• First type concerns those whom we call “irritable”: they are angry too quickly and for a slight cause. These are people who blow up for no reason or who easily snap. Those who are around them know that they can lose their temper easily.
• Second type concerns those who are sullen. They are angry for too long because they are continually refreshing the memory of the injury done to them. They stew over their anger. Instead of trying to get rid of it, they foster it within themselves and keep it burning.
• Third type concerns those who do not rest until they have exacted revenge, or a certain punishment on those who have done them wrong. This is even worse than simply holding a grudge; it entails holding a grudge and passing into action in order to harm the other.

The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

• This story has such a Catholic spirit on the question of anger. It shows how dangerous is the spirit of revenge and how we must imitate Our Lord’s spirit of forgiveness.

Sermon for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, 2024

• We are tempted today by the false idea of religious indifferentism: this is the idea that all religions are equally good, that they all lead to Heaven.
• The Athanasian Creed is very clear in saying the opposite. Its opening words say the following: “Whoever wills to be in a state of salvation, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith, which except everyone shall have kept whole and undefiled without doubt he will perish eternally. Now the catholic faith is that we worship One God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the substance.”
• These words, while they represent what we believe, are very jarring to modern ears. Modern people say: “Why is this the case? How is it that we can be damned to Hell for a single false belief? “How can God damn me to Hell for the way that I think? Did He not give me free will? Why would He care what I think?”1. The truth is part of what gets you to Heaven. You cannot get to Heaven without the truth. The truth of the Trinity is a truth about God Himself. It is God telling you Who He is. If God tells you who He is and you refuse to believe it and worship something else, then you are not worshiping the true God. You are worshiping a false god!
• 2. Heresy is a sin against God. We are obliged to obey Him because we are His creatures. If God tells me Who He is and tells me to believe Him, then I sin against Him by rejecting what He has said. I am saying that I do not believe Him. I am saying that I do not want Him. This is why belief in the Trinity was so important for Our Lord. Remember what He said:“Go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20). “He who believes and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believes not shall be condemned” (Mk. 16:16)This is why the martyrs throughout the history of the Church were willing to die rather than deny the faith. They realized that when they were being asked to deny the faith, they were being asked to make a choice: lose your physical life or lose your eternal life.

• When Our Lord came on this earth, He issued a new commandment, one that summarized and complemented the ten commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai.
• He did not issue this commandment from a mountain, accompanied by thunder and smoke, but He issued it in the midst of a last supper with His twelve Apostles.
• It was then that He said, “A new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another, as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.” (Jn. 13:34)
• The teaching of Our Lord transformed the world. It made the world Christian and civilized in the truest sense. It did so by teaching the world how to love. He clarified that true love means:

1. We love God above all things. We acknowledge Him as our Father, we worship Him as our God, we seek to honor Him in all that we do. We follow His will. We love Him by keeping His commandments.
2. Love means giving ourselves; it is not about receiving. It is about doing good to others. It is about sacrificing ourselves. It is about spending ourselves; it is about giving away our lives.
3. Giving ourselves for God and for others means suffering. Love requires suffering. It requires that we carry a cross. This is what Our Lord makes clear for us. Do you want to follow the commandment of love? Do you want to be a lover like Christ? Take up your cross! Die on the cross! Our Lord has the most astonishing words to say to us: “He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not up his cross, and followeth me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for me, shall find it.”

• God is at the origin of two orders in creation, the natural and the supernatural.
• The natural order concerns God’s material reality and the things of this earth. The supernatural order concerns God’s spiritual reality, the things of Heaven.
• These two realms are very distant from one another. When we speak of two things being very far from one another, we say it is like the distance between heaven and earth.
• At the same time, they are connected. God does not separate them into two completely separate realms but He makes there to be an interaction between them. We ourselves are natural creatures but God has elevated us to the supernatural level.
• Many of the realities that we experience in our everyday natural level also exist on the supernatural level, only they are more elevated and sublime.
• I want to take one example of this today: that of motherhood. Let us look at the motherhood that God has created in our natural world and then look at supernatural motherhood.

• In 1978, four businessmen pooled their resources to found the home improvement chain Home Depot. The point of the store was to provide a place where homeowners could go to buy tools and parts to renovate or repair their house. One of the slogans over the years was, “You can do it. We can help.”
• Home Depot represents something of the American spirit. We have a go-getter, do it yourself attitude. Why hire someone when you can just figure things out, buy the parts and do it on your own. Doesn’t that save a lot of trouble?
• What I want to point out in this sermon is that such a spirit is not proper in the realm of religion; it must not be translated to the religious sphere such that we become Home Depot Catholics, such that we pursue a do it yourself salvation.
• What do I mean by a Home Depot Catholicism or a Do It Yourself Catholicism?
• Home Depot Catholics come to church merely to acquire the material parts they need to keep their souls going and so attain salvation. Get Mass. Get confession. Get Communion. Throw some money in the collection basket. Go home. Save my soul.
• This is not the way that Our Lord established His religion, His Mystical Body. He established it in such a way that the members of the Catholic faith are not only united with Him, but they are also united with one another through Him. They all live the same life; they form one body together. And they are meant to live that reality by associating themselves with one another.