Processional: #197 – Praise to the Lord
Offertory: #462 – Ubi Caritas
Communion No. 1: #323 – Bread of Life
Communion No. 2: #368 – Bread of Life
Recessional: #594 – Thanks Be to God

Grade 1 – Claudia O.
If Jesus was my neighbor I would go over and give him a big hug. I would share my toys and my I-Touch. I would let him play with my dog and he could come to dinner every night.

Grade 1 – Maddie K.
If Jesus was my neighbor I would always say ‘Hi’ to him. ‘Would you play with me? Teach me about God please. Can you go to fro-yo with me? How about going to a movie and having some popcorn?’ We would invite others to come along and have fun.

And I too, to my horror, find myself becoming more like my father. When I clear my throat, I hear him. This is to my horror, because growing up, there was no one who I wanted more NOT to be like, than my father. And I know my teenage sister would have died from shock if she knew she would become like my mother.

As I age, I find I have a lot more to be critical of in society. I remember the conversations around the dinner table as a child,
and you could always count on my father to be a sharp critic of most things contemporary. I judged him then to be old fashioned (but who doesn’t think their parents are old fashioned?) Yet, he did say that he thought the best time ever to live would have been in about 1880. None of us ever asked for an explanation, not even my mother, who dismissed living before penicillin as much less desirable than the present.

But I imagine that in 1885 there must have been a lot of deserved pride and euphoria when the French ship Isere delivered the Statue of Liberty to New York Harbor. In one hundred years of nationhood, the U.S. had arrived at a powerful maturity with seemingly unbounded prospects.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Millions of Catholic and Jewish immigrants responded to the call of opportunity. And how well we managed those prospects in most of the 20th Century! We saved the world twice from tyranny and outright evil.

Now I warn you, I look for connections. The Statue of Liberty arrived on June 16, 1885.

It was on June 16, 1963, that the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in the case Abington School District v. Schempp, one of 3 lawsuits which outlawed Bible readings and prayer in public schools. This was a marked departure from our national traditions. The decision was well meaning, intending to safeguard the rights of non-Christians and non-believers, of which there were a growing number. The court did acknowledge the value of religious ideals and values to our culture, but still found it necessary to enforce in this venue of forming the character of our children not just a separation of Church and state, but an absence of God.

One cannot argue post hoc, ergo propter hoc. But things here did largely go downhill post hoc. To wit, on June 16, 1972, 5 men were arrested for burglarizing the Democratic Party Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. We later learned that the burglary was ordered by people high in the President’s staff and that the President, who was paranoid about losing elections, tried to cover up his staff’s involvement. O sure, there has always been skullduggery in politics, but seldom so brazen and crude as that was. Just read the transcripts of or listen to Nixon’s White House office tapes.

Nixon was popular. His downfall, and the debacle in Viet-Nam, was to American national faith what the Holocaust was to Jewish faith. A lot has happened since.

Perhaps we have lost something, some spirit or élan vital, that we had back before we conquered the world; perhaps. But certainly our nation, and most of the western world, has lost, misplaced or shelved its religious faith. This is part of the cause for the Conflict of Civilizations which much of our press and academia chooses to ignore. It is too easy to say that God is reducing His blessings to us, but perhaps because we do not recognize them, and we don’t trust in them, and we don’t ask for them, that we ourselves are reducing His blessings.

I try hard not to be old fashioned. What is past cannot ever be reclaimed. Time marches on, and it is up to us to make the present and future progress rather than regress. Today opportunities abound all around us for the blessings of progress. But without God, can we really succeed?

Processional: #555 – Come, Christians, Join to Sing
Offertory: #686 – Yes, I Shall Arise
Communion No. 1: #327 – Gift of Finest Wheat
Communion No. 2: #325 – O Sacrament Most Holy
Recessional: #198 – Now Thank We All Our God

The RCIA is for those who . . .

Are not baptized and want to become Catholic Christian through the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist.

Are baptized Christians from another faith tradition or Catholic who want full sacramental membership in the Catholic Church through Confirmation and Eucharist.

For more information, please contact Linda Borchardt, Pastoral Minister, at 314.878.2120 or lborchardt@stanselmstl.org.

But more significantly for us, in 1784 on June 9, Pope Pius VI appointed the Jesuit John Carroll superior of the American missions. He became the first American bishop and archbishop (of Baltimore) and founded Georgetown University.

So this is sort of the birthday of the United States’ Catholic Church. O sure, the French were here before in the North and here in the Mississippi Valley, and the Spanish in Florida and the South-West, but they never had the cultural and political punch of that first Church that emerged from the original 13 colonies in Maryland.

The Church has come a long way since then. It begrudgingly enjoyed the religious freedom protected by the Constitution but suffered the prejudice of the establishment. It grew with the great migration of European Catholic immigrants to America and established a parallel society of schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, charities, etc. Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore and the second American Cardinal, was an advisor to U.S. Presidents and an advocate of the rights of labor.

The Church was in its prime in the 1930’s to the 1970’s. Hollywood listened to the Legion of Decency. Our own Cardinal Ritter led the nation in desegregating schools. Bishop Sheen reigned on TV. Little happened in New York without Cardinal Spellman’s approval. Under God was added to the pledge of allegiance to the flag as the Church joined our American crusade against Communism in the 1950’s and 1960’s. And we were so proud when John F. Kennedy was elected the first Catholic President of the United States. And on October 4, 1965, Pope Paul VI became the first Pope to visit the United States.

As we have learned of late, a lot of sins were swept under the rug in those heady years and vulnerable children hurt badly. Perhaps the Church had become too powerful; power corrupts. The attitude of privilege and the modern preoccupation with sex proved the downfall of too many servants of the Church from then until now.

Hopefully the mistakes and sins of the past have all come to light so we can move past them, all the while being sure they don’t recur. The U.S. Church now has 18 Cardinals, the second highest number behind only Italy, which enjoys a home court advantage. That is an amazing growth over the last 228 years since John Carroll received his appointment.

The Church as a whole is entering a refreshing new age with Pope Francis, an age of humility which stands in contrast to what Pope Francis calls theological or ecclesiastical narcissism. It’s a tricky balancing act, this new humility. The Church has a lot to be proud of and it has the precious faith, the truth of revelation handed down to us from the Apostles. But it must express this truth in a way that our modern contemporaries can understand, listen to and appreciate. And that’s a challenge. As Cole Porter wrote in one of his hit songs, Anything Goes.

Times have changed
And we’ve often rewound the clock
Since the Puritans got a shock
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today
Any shock they should try to stem
‘Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.

One of our newest Cardinals who helped elect Pope Francis, and a Saint Louisan at that, Cardinal Dolan, recently gave a homily which addressed this challenge. He concluded with the words: An effective pastor cherishes, protects, feeds, and leads his flock, while welcoming his sheep into the fold. But . . . he will not let them wander off and do whatever or go wherever the sheep might want to go. His duty is to bring them back and rescue them from danger. This shepherd is still trying to learn how to be like that, to love all without ever compromising the ‘truth’.

That’s the Cardinal archbishop of New York speaking, still trying to learn. Let the Church say Amen! and then do the same.

Processional: #559 – Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven
Offertory: #207 – Soul of My Savior
Communion No. 1: #327 – Gift of Finest Wheat
Communion No. 2: #489 – God With Hidden Majesty (red Worship III book)
Recessional: #744 – Alleluia! Sing to Jesus

Please pray for our Christ Power retreat that begins next Sunday, June 9th. We will be serving the St. Louis community and staying at John F. Kennedy High School. Thank you!