Well, the great feast of all Saints is behind us, and while that has always been a popular feast in the life of the Church, it has been an especially important one for me. I grew up in a parish on the north side of Houston that was blessed to be called the Church of All Saints. November 1st was always a school holiday. That really made a nine year old kid appreciate the sacredness of that day! The parish gave me a first rate elementary education at the cost of approximately $2.50 per month, so I have some reason to be grateful. I would spend the rest of my life celebrating the goodness and generosity of that school and the Dominican sisters who made that education possible. I stay in touch with them, but will never be able to adequately thank them. All Saints was not just a place where I went to elementary school. It was a great beautiful Church in an older part of the city. The current pastor has led a magnificent renovation of this nearly 100 year old structure, and it is now proudly titled the Cathedral of the Heights. I regret I am not able to get to Houston much any more, but when I do, I always insert a brief but very nostalgic trip to this church. I go inside the church- still splendid at the end of a century- and think about the fact that I was baptized- made the brother of Jesus- at that font. The old Communion rail is gone, but there is the spot where I knelt and received Holy communion for the first time. Only a few feet away, old Bishop Byrne confirmed upon me the Sacrament of Confirmation that marked the fact that I was called to walk in the footsteps as a committed follower of Jesus of Nazareth.
I was not a perfect kid! There were times, young as I was, that I acted improperly. The sisters backed up my mother in teaching me the correct moral code for life. When I became conscious of having failed, over on the side of the church was a cute little triple box where I knelt before an ordained priest, admitted the sorrow that I had not lived up to what Jesus has called me to do and to be. But, I never left that little box without a joyous sense of relief and forgiveness.
The Church does not use the Sacrament of Reconciliation today as well as it did then, and that is truly a tragic loss. I pray for a resurgence.
Walking back towards the exit I pass the spot where my father, my mother, and my siblings funeral services were conducted. Then, out the front door, I realize what a magnificent thing is the gift of memory!

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Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
I think that many of us when we think about what it means to be a good Catholic or a committed Methodist often connect that with obeying the laws of the church – to avoid sin, to not do evil, to not hurt people, etc., etc. Those are good things to consider but when you take a look at the first and third readings today you will see that those are the EFFECTS of carrying out the law.
The natural law that comes from God is the same law that is repeated today in an excerpt from Saint Mark’s Gospel. It is extraordinarily simple and direct. The law is that we are to love our God, totally and completely and because of that love let it flow through us into the lives of those with whom we are sharing life. God’s law is all about love. If it tells us not to steal, not to lie, avoid sexual transgressions, etc., it is because those acts are failures in love. I think we should try and think about that for a moment. God wants each one of us to be consumed – CONSUMED – with a constant awareness of his infinite goodness and that each of us has been enriched in our existence because this infinite being loves each of us personally, totally and completely. Love begets love and if we can clearly keep in our minds the reality of God’s love, then we ought to respond in like manner.

What is a saint and what is the difference between a true saint and one of us who is just stumbling towards eternal life. It is the degree of burning love inside our hearts, so powerful that it sweeps aside this daily temptation and centers our minds and hearts on the source of our being, Almighty God. It is when we grasp this reality that life becomes constant joy and our lives, even when surrounded by terrible problems, are lived with confidence and hope.

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I really like the feast of All Saints and enjoy celebrating it. One reason is because the Feast of All Saints is a big tent feast. Everybody is in it. We are all together. While we haven’t achieved eternal life, we are certainly candidates for it. We are on our way, and most important today is that we are on our way together.

Another reason why I like the feast is that I grew up in a parish named All Saints. My mother was in the parish when it started in 1907. It was a young diverse Catholic community out on the northern edge of Houston and about three miles from downtown. Today, All Saints would be considered an inner-city parish but it has a lot of life. Gentrification has made it young again.

We are a very mobile society and over the course of several decades, Catholics might live in a good many parishes. That is understandable but there is a certain sadness to it, since it causes so many of us to be spiritually rootless.

All Saints was a marker in my life. My mother, father and three siblings were buried from that church. I made my First Communion, Confirmation and celebrated my first Mass as a priest at the altar of All Saints. Later, as a bishop, it would be the first church where I would celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation. To me, All Saints in the Houston Heights is a sacred place that provided me with clear markers for my spiritual journey.

All Saints! Such a crowd. Think of it- millions, millions, and millions of men and women who faced an unbelievable range of difficulties and burdens in this life but maintained their faith in Jesus Christ or lived good lives according to their consciences. Not all the saints are saints at this moment. All of us are, however, on the journey to sanctity and we are on that journey together!

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“Tony, Tony, Look around- something’s lost, and must be found!”

Today is Halloween, which makes tomorrow the great feast of All Saints Day. Let’s remember our special saint- St. Anthony- as we prepare for the feast…

Several times I have referred to the fact that religious life inside the enormous Roman Catholic family of faith is warm and cozy. We feel close to our parents and other relatives who have gone before us. We talk to them while we are driving the car. We call their attention to our problems as though we didn’t think they were aware of them, but of course, they are! If that is true of our relatives, it’s even more true about heroically holy men and women who the Church has given the title “Saints.”

When we head out to Dallas on I35, we ask St. Christopher to stay close to us. When a new pet is brought in to the house, we know he is a special friend of St. Francis of Assisi. On that great saint’s feast day, we frequently have a communal blessing of animals, because he saw every living being as a brother or a sister. In other words, he is a good friend of the pets!

The one that I turn to most frequently is St. Anthony of Padua, the patron of lost items. Do you ever misplace your car keys? Have you wondered around your house for 15 minutes looking for your eye glasses only to have your daughter tell you they are on your head? Well, those are light hearted items, but we really do believe that St. Anthony has a special interest in people who are in serious trouble because of something important having been lost. We don’t ask him to perform miracles, but we do ask him to help us use our brains, our memories and our eye sight more effectively. I have had this devotion my entire adult life, and I can tell you something- it WORKS! Maybe I should say, he works.

PS. A more serious prayer is:
St. Anthony, perfect imitator of Jesus, who received from God the special power of restoring lost things, grant that I may find (name your lost item) which has been lost. At least restore to me peace and tranquility of mind, the loss of which has afflicted me even more than my material loss. To this favor, I ask another of you: that I may always remain in possession of the true good that is God. Let me rather lose all things than lose God, my supreme good. Let me never suffer the loss of my greatest treasure, eternal life with God. Amen.

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Catholicism sees itself as an enormous family of faith. I mentioned in an earlier blog that one of the things that I love about day-to-day Catholicism is our firm belief in the Communion of Saints; that those of us here on earth, and those who have gone before us and are with God, can be united by prayer and the saints assist us by their intercession before the throne of God, and by the example that they had given to us while they were among us. Through this firm belief about an interaction between heaven and earth, there has developed a secondary belief or practice; namely, that saints with whom we feel a special relationship, either because they are our patron or they did the same type of work that we did, are concerned about and respond to our requests that they join their prayers to ours as we worship the infinite God. St. Thomas More is the patron of lawyers. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine are patrons of scholars. Black teenagers have St. Charles Lwanga. It is interesting – it is almost like having a lobbyist in heaven!

The above facts are going to affect the way the liturgy manifests itself in the next few months. Pentecost and several of the major Christological feasts are behind us and we are going into that second half of the year, which simply passes by the rather bland title, “Ordinary Time.” We say it is ordinary because the exciting seasons that centered on the coming of Jesus, his saving work, his resurrection and return to his heavenly Father are all behind us. The mood of these seasons will not appear again until December. However, the Church doesn’t want us to fall asleep so it scatters into the liturgy the lives of wonderful men and women who have gone before us and the Church asks us to look at them, to use their example, to attempt to walk in their footsteps the way that they walked in the footsteps of Jesus, and to live lives that are based on faith.

A joint feast, marking two of the most extraordinarily lives, is soon coming up. I am talking about the Feasts of Sts. Peter and Paul, which we will celebrate on June 29th.

Peter and Paul – the Catholic Church always puts them together. They are the basic rocks, bricks, slabs, foundation on which the Church of the first century would be built. Peter would work in the Jerusalem area and then move on to Rome while Paul would cover a great deal of the eastern half of the Mediterranean. They laid a marvelous foundation and they brought the message of Jesus to the people of that period and ultimately both of them would die for their faith in Jesus Christ. Paul would be decapitated and, tradition has it, that Peter would be executed upside down, as he did not feel worthy to die in the same way as his Lord.

How blessed we were to have them among us and how much we need men and women today to imitate their burning desire to tell the world the joyous news of Jesus of Nazareth.

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Here it is again! The happy, joyous celebration of Valentine’s Day. Most of us don’t really stop much to think about it, except that we tend to think about it as a great promotional scheme developed by the candy and card makers. Actually, like so many aspects of the early church, it flows out of a really delightful story. St. Valentine was a very committed member of the church in the fourth century, but his timing was bad. He was caught for practicing his faith in one of the very last of the persecutions.

His crime? St. Valentine was arrested for fostering Christian couples to build solid communities of faith. He witnessed many of their marriages. We don’t know a great many details of his life, but supposedly while he was incarcerated, he healed his jailer’s daughter from her blindness, and before St. Valentine was executed, he sent that girl a note and signed it “from your Valentine”. Gradually his name became associated with romantic love, and he is the patron saint of young couples contemplating marriage (and bee keepers- why? I don’t know-maybe it’s the honey?)

Happy St. Valentine’s Day!

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I really like the feast of All Saints and enjoy celebrating  it.  One reason is because the Feast of All Saints is a big tent feast.  Everybody is in it.  We are all together.  While we haven’t achieved eternal life, we are certainly candidates for it.  We are on our way, and most important today is that we are on our way together.

Another reason why I like the feast is that I grew up in a parish named All Saints.  My mother was in the parish when it started in 1907.  It was a young diverse Catholic community out on the northern edge of Houston and about three miles from downtown.  Today, All Saints would be considered an inner-city parish but it has a lot of life.  Gentrification has made it young again.

We are a very mobile society and over the course of several decades, Catholics might live in a good many parishes.  That is understandable but there is a certain sadness to it, since it causes so many of us to be spiritually rootless.

All Saints was a marker in my life.  My mother, father and three siblings were buried from that church.  I made my First Communion, Confirmation and celebrated my first Mass as a priest at the altar of All Saints.  Later, as a bishop, it would be the first church where I would celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation.  To me, All Saints in the Houston Heights is a sacred place that provided me with clear markers for my spiritual journey.

All Saints! Such a crowd.  Think of it- millions, millions, and millions of men and women who faced an unbelievable range of difficulties and burdens in this life but maintained their faith in Jesus Christ or lived good lives according to their consciences.  Not all the saints are saints at this moment.  All of us are, however, on the journey to sanctity and we are on that journey together!

Special thanks to the young saints at my parish, St. Theresa’s here in Austin, pictured above.

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The Society of Jesus, most popularly known as the Jesuits, is one of the strongest and most important religious communities in the Catholic Church. Founded by Ignatius Loyola, it grew rapidly and actively involved itself in every activity of Church life. Today, when we think of the Jesuits, many of us tend to think of the Jesuits as academicians teaching in the many colleges and universities that they have established across the world. They have 27 separate universities just in the United States. What an accomplishment!

However, the Jesuits are also among the greatest missionaries in the life of the Church over the last four centuries. This week, we are reminded of that fact because today we celebrate the memory of St. John de Brebeauf and St. Isaac Jogues, two extraordinary missionaries who courageously worked among the Huron Indians in Canada and the Iroquois in New York. After years of exhausting missionary activity, these two brave men would ultimately be killed by the people among whom they were working.

Some of us wake up on Sunday morning and if there is a hard rain, we decide that we will cut Mass this week and “catch up” next Sunday. When we are faced with a temptation like that, we ought to think about the extraordinary generosity of those who helped to build the faith in North America. The Jesuits were among the best!

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We’ve been visiting about the saints lately, and I think at this point I should put in a comment about an all-important aspect about devotion to saints. CATHOLICS DO NOT WORSHIP SAINTS!! We love them, we admire them, we struggle to imitate them and we thank God for their presence among us. BUT, WE DO NOT WORSHIP THEM.

Only GOD can be worshipped. God is the author of all existence, all creation, and it is right for us to fall on our knees and adore Him. Saints were and are simply human beings who dwelt among us and led extraordinary lives of commitment to Jesus Christ and His Heavenly Father.

We all need encouragement. We all need examples of success. This is true in sports, government leaders, the world of science, and every other major area of human endeavor. It therefore is certainly necessary for we, the baptized brothers and sisters of Jesus, to keep examples before our eyes of men and women gone before us and who left concrete examples of heroic virtue and holiness.

So, when you go into a Catholic Church, and you see St. Ignatius of Loyola in an alcove of one side of the church, or St. Theresa, they are not items of idolatry, but tools in a normal need to be reminded of their example. Another example of symbolic reminders is our Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor. Whether people are leaving or entering the country, people are profoundly moved by the sight. It is not just an enormous hunk of metal, but a symbolic reminder of what the United States stands for. My mother’s picture beside my desk provides the same type of service.
This is the role of all Christian art, saint statues included!

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Catholicism sees itself as an enormous family of faith. I mentioned in an earlier blog that one of the things that I love about day-to-day Catholicism is our firm belief in the Communion of Saints; that those of us here on earth, and those who have gone before us and are with God, can be united by prayer and the saints assist us by their intercession before the throne of God, and by the example that they had given to us while they were among us. Through this firm belief about an interaction between heaven and earth, there has developed a secondary belief or practice; namely, that saints with whom we feel a special relationship, either because they are our patron or they did the same type of work that we did, are concerned about and respond to our requests that they join their prayers to ours as we worship the infinite God. St. Thomas More is the patron of lawyers. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine are patrons of scholars. Black teenagers have St. Charles Lwanga. It is interesting – it is almost like having a lobbyist in heaven!

The above facts are going to affect the way the liturgy manifests itself in the next few months. Pentecost and several of the major Christological feasts are behind us and we are going into that second half of the year, which simply passes by the rather bland title, “Ordinary Time.” We say it is ordinary because the exciting seasons that centered on the coming of Jesus, his saving work, his resurrection and return to his heavenly Father are all behind us. The mood of these seasons will not appear again until December. However, the Church doesn’t want us to fall asleep so it scatters into the liturgy the lives of wonderful men and women who have gone before us and the Church asks us to look at them, to use their example, to attempt to walk in their footsteps the way that they walked in the footsteps of Jesus, and to live lives that are based on faith.

A joint feast, marking two of the most extraordinarily lives, is soon coming up. I am talking about the Feasts of Sts. Peter and Paul, which we will celebrate on June 29th.

Peter and Paul – the Catholic Church always puts them together. They are the basic rocks, bricks, slabs, foundation on which the Church of the first century would be built. Peter would work in the Jerusalem area and then move on to Rome while Paul would cover a great deal of the eastern half of the Mediterranean. They laid a marvelous foundation and they brought the message of Jesus to the people of that period and ultimately both of them would die for their faith in Jesus Christ. Paul would be decapitated and, tradition has it, that Peter would be executed upside down, as he did not feel worthy to die in the same way as his Lord.

How blessed we were to have them among us and how much we need men and women today to imitate their burning desire to tell the world the joyous news of Jesus of Nazareth.

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