Over the past few weeks we have been speaking about The Ten Commandments.  We spoke about the Commandment to Keep Holy the Seventh Day, and the Commandments not to steal or cheat or commit adultery or kill.

We spoke about the importance of God’s law being written on our hearts, and today we hear this again from Moses in the Old Testament:

“Moses told the people,
‘Take these words of mine into your heart and soul.’”

And God told Moses,

“I set before you here, this day, a blessing and a curse:
a blessing for obeying the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I enjoin on you today;
a curse if you do not obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, but turn aside from the way I ordain for you today,

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When I was a young man, almost an adult, I was searching for my identity as a man. We all go through something like this as we approach adulthood. Perhaps the most important discovery for me was the realization that I was experiencing a spiritual hunger for the real man, the man of virtue and courage in faith and morals; I was seeking male spirituality along with male identity. When I experienced it, this resonated with me in my bones. I still was not Catholic, but I seemed to find this ideal more frequently among men of strong Catholic faith. When I encountered men, young or old who were devoted to Jesus, to the Church and to the Blessed Mother, and who practiced their faith sincerely I found myself drawn to their example of manhood. [Read more…]

Jesus asks us to let our light shine before all nations, the light of our faith and our good deeds, he is calling us to be bold in our faith and not be hesitant.  The Psalm tells us, “The just man is a light in darkness to the upright.”

We have been called to conversion, to examine our lives and to repent of our sins.  Once in a while it is good to take a step back and see whether we actually know and understand what is sin and how we may be sinning. [Read more…]

The day after John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the Jordan, John saw Jesus nearby and pointed him out to his disciples, saying, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” We continue to reflect upon Jesus’ baptism and our baptism.

This year will be ten years since the terrorist attacks on our country on September 11, 2001. Those events changed our lives in large and small ways. As a permanent deacon at that time, I began to pay more attention to the religion of Islam. A Muslim friend of mine helped me to understand something about Islam, and together we got involved in inter-religious ministry, between Muslims and Catholics, with the help and guidance of Bishop Aymond. That experience helped me to deepen my Catholic faith.
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For the sake of our visitors, and to avoid scandal allow me to share again that I was married for 37 years.  My wife and I have six children and I have twelve grandchildren.  Cynthia passed away a few years ago, and I later went to the seminary.

When Cynthia and I were dating and were students at the University of Dallas, a great Catholic school, by the way, we began to talk about the possibility of marriage.  Fairly soon, the topic of children arose.  She was one of two children in her family, and I was the oldest of three children.  We compromised and settled upon a good number of 2.5 children as the acceptable number, since it was close to the national average at the time.  That conversation represented our maturity at that point.
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Catholic Christians claim our faith and mature in our faith by repeating the truths of our faith over and over again, year in, year out. If we don’t repeat these truths, as children and young adults, and older adults, we lose our grasp of them; we lose the clarity. Worse, others don’t hear them.
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There is an ancient prayer of the Church known as “Alma Redemptoris Mater”. It goes like this:

Loving Mother of the Redeemer,
gate of heaven, star of the sea,
assist your people who have fallen yet strive to rise again.
To the wonderment of nature you bore your Creator,
yet remained a virgin as before.
You who received Gabriel’s joyful greeting,
have pity on us poor sinners.

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Jesus warns us about false prophets and false messiahs.  Once I met the “Messiah”.  At least he claimed to be the “Messiah”.  We had interesting conversations, inspired largely by his curiosity about the end times and the “rapture”.  He assured me that the end of the world will come on December 12^th, 2012.

Scripture is very clear, both in the prophets and in Jesus’ teachings:  The world will come to an end.  The prophet Malachi tells us,

“Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven,
when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble,
and the day that is coming will set them on fire,
leaving them neither root nor branch, ….”

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Remembering is required of Christians. Perhaps one of the main struggles that God had with the Israelites was that they didn’t want to remember Him. They didn’t want to be indebted to God for all He had done for them. Remembering brings responsibilities. If you remember, you have to do something. Like showing gratitude and remembering to obey God’s commandments and to live the values that our faith teaches.

Our Christian faith, our Church, is founded upon remembering. We gather to remember. In our Mass, we hear in the words of consecration, “Do this in remembrance of me.” We remember to give thanks together. Remembering is our duty. It is impossible to be Christian and choose to forget.

Today we remember St. Martin of Tours. Why?
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Gentiles had no real recognition within Israelite society. They were pagans. While they were to be accorded decent treatment, they were always in a subordinate, even marginal position.

Leprosy is a serious disease in which results is serious skin lesions and deformities. A leper was considered unclean and was barred from any contact with the community. To be both a Gentile and a leper was to come as close to being a non-person as could be imagined.

The closest example I can imagine as a non-person today, might be a homeless or illegal immigrant with Aids or Tuberculosis. Most people would not have anything to do with them.
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Most of you know that I was married and a permanent deacon before going to the seminary and becoming a priest. When my wife, Cynthia, was a patient at MD Anderson Cancer Hospital a few years ago, the nun who founded the chaplain program there, Sister Alice Potts, came daily to minister to her. Over the years Sr. Alice developed the practice of giving away small angels to her patients. In return her patients would give Sr. Alice more angels as gifts, which Sister would later hand out to even more patients. Her office was full of these angel gifts. One day Sr. Alice brought to Cynthia’s room a television crew that was doing a story on Sr. Alice. They were filming Sr. Alice’s visit to one of her patients. From her hospital bed Cynthia was recorded telling her, “Sister, this is a beautiful thing you are doing. Angels are very important to God and people. Nobody is afraid of angels. God sends angels to people who need God, but are afraid of God, because angels are much less intimidating to those whose faith is weak.”
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In the Confessional I have encountered the most awesome experiences of God. In the Sacrament of Reconciliation there is conversion happening some people’s lives, sometimes more than others. Once in a while someone comes to Confession who has not been to Church or Confession in years. That doesn’t happen without God being very active in their hearts. Something powerful is happening in them. That is when I know I am in the presence of God, when God is very present to them at those moments of their conversion from sin, returning to God. We are on holy ground when a person shares that moment. It is then that I understand Jesus’ teaching that there is great rejoicing in heaven when a sinner repents, like the women who finds her last coin, or the shepherd who found the lost sheep, or the joy of the father upon the return of the lost son.
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From the earliest centuries of the Church, the Assumption into Heaven of the Blessed Virgin Mary, body and soul, has been a subject of veneration and Christian doctrine.

However, there is no direct biblical source for this belief.  There is no historical record.  We don’t know the time or the place of the end of Mary’s life on earth.  Our most faithful source is Apostolic Tradition.  There are references to the Apostles’ belief in the Assumption in the writings of the early Fathers of the Church.  Finally, after centuries of belief and veneration, just sixty years ago, in 1950, Pope Pius XII stated that Mary’s Assumption is Church dogma.  Pope Pius XII wrote that Mary, “having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”  He merely stated as dogmatic truth what the Church has believed and taught from the beginning.
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When I was a permanent deacon men would ask me a certain question with some frequency. When I was working with men’s groups in my parish they would ask me this question. They knew that I was still working in my business career, like most of them. Men with whom I worked in business would also ask this question.

This question is an important one: How do you combine your faith with your work in the world?
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According to the story told about Mother Teresa, St. Teresa of Calcutta, she was in a meeting with her order, the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, India. One of the sisters asked her, “Mother, I have a request for you to consider. There are so many sick and dying people coming to our hospital and we barely have time to take care of them. Our Rule of Life requires that we spend one hour a day in prayer and meditation in the chapel before the Blessed Sacrament in a Holy Hour. Would you please consider making that requirement optional, so we can decide when we can do it? There are so many people sometimes that we simply do not have the time every day to make our Holy Hour.” (In a Holy Hour, the Blessed Sacrament is placed in a monstrance on the Altar so people can pray in silence before the Lord.) As the story goes, Mother Teresa responded something like this, “Sister, allow me to think about your request.”
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I am in love. Deeply, madly, shamelessly in love.

I recognize the symptoms because I have fallen in love before. I have loved a woman. I was married for 37 years to Cynthia and we have six children. This past weekend I could not be with you because I traveled to baptize our twelfth grandchild. I lost Cynthia a few years ago due to Cancer.

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My grandson Gabriel made his First Communion a few weeks ago, just prior to my ordination. Gabriel was going to Confession before his First Communion when he said, “Granddad, just think, if you were already a priest you could hear my Confession.” That caught me off guard, but I told him, “Gabe, I want to be your Granddad. It’s better for you to go to another priest.”
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