I really love it when we can see how something in the new covenant follows the old. In the old covenant, as we see in the first reading, there was a prime minister. There were ministers who governed the country and from them one was chosen to be the prime minister who was second only to the King. The Prime Minister held an office which had successors. In this case, the Prime Minister Shebna will be replaced by Eliakim. He is described as a father. He has authority. When he opens, no one shall shut; when he shuts, no one shall open. And he is given the key to the house of David.

In the new covenant, Jesus chose 12 apostles and from them, he chose Peter to be his chief apostle. What he binds on earth, shall be bound in heaven, what he looses on earth, shall be loosed in heaven. He is given the keys to the kingdom. And he is our Papa, or Pope. Clearly Jesus is building a new Davidic kingdom. And I saw something else while preparing for this homily that I hadn’t really noticed before.

I spent a lot of time studying the passage where Jesus says, “you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” I really wanted to understand this.  

In ancient Judaism, the gates of the netherworld were the opening leading down to Hades, the place of the dead, which was a dark and gloomy underworld deep in the bowels of the earth. It was also the place of evil powers who bring death and deception to the world. There was a tradition that the foundation stone of the temple was placed on top of, and sealed off the shaft leading down to this netherworld.

Peter is the new foundation stone. The commentaries say that Jesus is guaranteeing that the powers of death and deception will not overcome the Church. He enables Peter and his successors to hold error at bay and faithfully proclaim the gospel. The Church Fathers understood that the Church of Rome would never fall into heresy and that has been true. If you look at the history, all the great sees of the early Church, Alexandria, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Antioch, all had a bishop at some point that fell into heresy, except Rome. No bishop of Rome ever taught heresy.  i

That leads me to reflect on our current Pope and there’s 2 points I want to make.

The first is, I will confess that I have struggled with Pope Francis, but my attitude has softened recently. I was listening to a priest share an incident that he had when he was in the Seminary. He was walking by St. Peter’s in Rome with a priest, and they came across some transvestites. They started yelling and shouting nasty things to his priest friend, and he asked him, how is it that right outside St. Peters we can have people attack you like this? He said, this is nothing compared to what I have to sometimes deal with when I’m inside St. Peters. He was shocked – how is that possible? His priest friend said, look, where do you think the devil is going to concentrate his strongest attack? That spoke to me. I know a little something about the devil’s attacks, and I can’t imagine what our Holy Father has to deal with.

I thought of Our Blessed Mother. She has said in some recent apparitions that there would be problems in the Church. For example, at the approved apparition at Akita Japan in the late 1970’s, she told Sister Sasagawa that there would come a time when she would see bishop against bishop and Cardinal against Cardinal. Then she told her, I want you to pray and sacrifice for the Pope, for bishops and for priests. I believe there are times when it is appropriate for us to say something, but above all, Mary says pray and sacrifice.

And we know what Mary likes, the rosary and fasting. I just learned a couple interesting things about the *rosary from Fr. Callaway who is one of the Marian Fathers up in Stockbridge MA. He said that when Mary gave St. Dominic the rosary, she told him it would be a battering ram against falsehood and heresy. Fr. Callaway went on to say that several religious orders, like the Dominicans, where a rosary as part of their religious habit and most of the time they wear it on their left hip. This is intentional because it’s seen as a weapon like a sword; most people are right-handed so they would wear a sword on their left hip so they could unsheathe it. The rosary is Mary’s weapon of choice.

So, that’s the first point, we really need to pray and sacrifice for Pope Francis and all our priests and bishops. When my son was in Seminary, he heard a professor say wherever a priest ends up, he never goes alone. We must do what we can to help.

The second point is this: we have to guard against complacency with sin.

This was brought home to me recently in my Carmelite community meeting. I was reading St. Teresa of Avila and she was talking about perfect love versus imperfect love and then she made almost a passing comment about sinful love and her reaction was so strong – God deliver us from that. Sisters, don’t even think about that; don’t even mention it, even in jest.

It reminded me of something my grandma said many years ago. She was talking about going on a mission at the church and back in her day, the missions were done separately for men and women, and she said the priest warned the ladies about some sexual sin. I forget what it was, but I’ll never forget her expression, she was horrified. She said they would never even think of such a thing.

It just really hit me, things that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago are no big deal for us today. Fr. Gerald Murray wrote an excellent article on this called “The Worsening Crisis” in which he quotes a great Catholic philosopher, Dietrich Von Hildebrand, who wrote about this 50 years ago. He said:

We must not underestimate the power of those ideas which fill the intellectual atmosphere of the time, nor the danger of being infected by them when we are daily breathing this atmosphere…

today we have to develop in ourselves a special awareness, a holy mistrust, for we not only live in a poisoned world, but in a devastated Church. In our present trial God requires of us this watchfulness, this holy fear of being infected. It would be a lack of humility to think we are in no danger of being infected. It would be a false security rooted in pride if we were to think that we are immune. Each of us must become aware of his frailty, and understand that special watchfulness is required of us by God in the trial we are going through.

The envelope has been pushed so far that we’re at a point where we must actively reject the secular culture around us, and actively foster and live a truly Catholic way – worship, sacraments, prayer, spiritual reading, fasting, almsgiving, good works, fellowship, community. We must consciously, deliberately, create an environment where the air we breathe is Christ. And we don’t do this just for ourselves; but so we can be a blessing to others. So, when people come to us disappointed or hurting because they’ve been living the way of the world, we can offer them a different vision of life, a different way of living.  God Bless you.

* After Fr. Calloway talks about the Rosary in this episode, you might find a surprising segment starting at the 10min. mark.