National Vocation Awareness Week

Today, I must travel to Washington, DC, for the annual meeting of Paulist Pastors, Superiors, and Directors. As in past years, we will be meeting at Saint Paul’s College, the Paulist seminary where generations of Paulist students have lived for now just over a century. (The photo is of the statue of Saint Paul in the driveway in front of the Paulist seminary in Washington's main entrance.) Half a century ago, Saint Paul’s College housed over 90 students! We reach a high of about 30 in my time as a seminarian. It is, inevitably, a special place rich in memories and powerful emotional associations. But times change, and new times bring with them new challenges.

One of the most serious challenges for the Church in our present time is fostering the necessary number of vocations, particularly to the priesthood and to religious life. Today is the beginning of National Vocation Awareness Week. In his 2013 Apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, (“The Joy of the Gospel”), Pope Francis underlined the continued need to foster a culture of vocations: “The fraternal life and fervor of the community can awaken in the young a desire to consecrate themselves completely to God and to preaching of the Gospel. This is particularly true if such a living community prays insistently for vocations and courageously proposes to its young people the path of special consecration.”

This has caused me to think about to the two vocation posters prominently displayed at present in the vestibule of the church, and in the parish hall, and also in the parish office. The first (above) features the faces of the bishop and the 14 deacons and other seminarians who are currently in various stages of formation to be ordained as priests of the Knoxville Diocese. The second (left) features the faces of the Vocation Director and 10 Paulist students and novices. (One student has since been ordained, and the four novices on the poster are now students who have in turn been replaced by two new novices.) 

Together, these posters portray 24 faces of otherwise ordinary young men, who have answered God’s invitation in this very special way. A picture, we have always been told, is worth a thousand words. Perhaps those pictures will speak to someone who looks at them in a way that invites him too to become one of the faces on the next set of such posters! Meanwhile, the rest of us need to keep each of them in our prayers and pray just as forcefully that the next two posters will have at least as many – or, better yet, even more – faces on them!

All Souls Day

In the year before his death, Paulist Founder Servant of God Isaac Hecker, wrote: “When, in 1843, I first read in the Catechism of the Council of Trent the doctrine of the communion of saints, it went right home. It alone was to me a heavier weight on the Catholic side of the scales than the best historical argument which could be presented” [“Dr. Brownson and Catholicity,” Catholic World, 1887]. 

By then, some 44 years had passed since Hecker’s initial encounter with the Catechism and its presentation on the communion of saints, but the passage of time had done nothing to dull the impact of what he had found there.  Appropriately so, since the Communion of Saints proclaims the bonds that connect us, not only across space, but even more profoundly across time. The doctrine of the communion of saints, the same Catechism explained, “teaches the practical spiritual purpose of the Creed as a whole. For the great end to which all our study and knowledge of the truths of the Creed are to be directed is our admission into this immense and blessed society of the saints” [The Roman Catechism, Article IX, 23, p. 111].

Yesterday, All Saints Day, the Church celebrated that part of the communion of saints traditionally known as “the Church Triumphant” – not just the Church’s thousands of officially recognized saints, but all those holy ones, known and unknown, who have attained the goal for which we on earth still strive. Living now forever with God, the saints help us by uniting their prayers with ours, thus uniting their intercession for us before God.

Today, All Souls Day, our focus is rather on all the rest of those who have died in God’s mercy and who were pleasing to God at their passing from this life. Every day, at every Mass, but especially today, we pray that they may be welcomed into the light of God’s face and be given kind admittance to his kingdom, along with the saints already in glory.

This afternoon, we will have our annual Rosary Procession at our parish cemetery. Cemeteries are special places for us Christians. Remembering is, first of all, a profoundly human activity. To remember those who have died is to acknowledge the importance of their lives - and the common humanity which we share with them. To remember those who have gone before us in faith is to celebrate the different ways in which the grace of God touched and transformed each one of them - and the hope we share with them.

This being the 160^th All Souls Day in the history of our parish, let us also remember today in a very special way all those parishioners who have been part of the life of our parish community, who quite literally built this parish - if in no other way than by virtue of their personal presence. The Parish Death Registers record the names of those, whose funerals have been celebrated here in our church. What an extensive human history those names represent! Some, we confidently hope, are already among those saints honored yesterday, while others may still be undergoing a process of purification, prior to their entrance into the full joy of heaven, and so may be the beneficiaries of our intercessory prayer on their behalf. What a wonderful network of holy souls whom we hope today to help by our prayers - and who in turn we hope are praying for us!

We remember all those departed parishioners whose commitment to the Body of Christ was incarnated in the charitable and social ministries of our parish - as well as all those who benefited from them. We remember all those students and their dedicated teachers and all whose commitment to the Body of Christ was incarnated in the educational ministries of our parish. We remember all those departed parishioners whose commitment to the Body of Christ was incarnated in the liturgical and musical ministries of the parish. The list goes on and on. All those people, most of whom none of us have ever met! Today, however, we remember them all. And, with them we remember also all those whose commitment to the Body of Christ was incarnated in their priestly service in this parish, among them – since 1973 – the various Paulist Fathers who have served here.

They have all gone before us in faith, in hope, and in love. And today, we remember them all.

May the angels take them into paradise; may the martyrs come to welcome them on their way and lead them into the holy city, Jerusalem. May the choir of angels welcome them, and with Lazarus, who once was poor, may they have everlasting rest.

Homily for the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed (All Souls Day), Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, November 2, 2014.

The Communion of Saints at the Cemetery

It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins (2 Maccabees 12:46).

Here in the northern hemisphere, at this time of year - as the sun rises a little later each morning and sets a little earlier each afternoon - there is a sense of time passing by, as yet another tired old year draws to a close. 

In our Catholic tradition, this month of November is dedicated in a special way to remembering and praying for those who have died. Just as remembering the dead is an important human duty, so too praying for the dead is an important Christian one. When we remember those who have died, we acknowledge our common humanity with them. For, like us, they lived, loved, worked, succeeded and failed, hoped and dreamed – both for themselves and for their families. And, like them, we too must eventually die. Our Christian faith, however, redefines for us the universal experience of dying and unites us with those who have gone before us not just in our common humanity but in what the Apostles’ Creed calls “the communion of saints.”

Modern society seems increasingly inclined to downplay death. Christian hope, in contrast, causes us both to treat all of life as a preparation for a good death and not to neglect our duty to pray for those who have gone before us. This is why celebrating a proper Catholic funeral for the deceased is so important. It is an especially privileged moment when the entire Church visibly intercedes on behalf on the recently deceased. But the Church’s intercession is on-going, which is why at every Mass there is explicit prayer for those who have died.


Since 1869, Immaculate Conception Church in Knoxville, TN, has maintained Calvary Cemetery. Fr, Michael Finnegan, Immaculate Conception’s pastor from 1868 to 1872, celebrated the first burials there and purchased the property for the parish. Located in East Knoxville (adjacent to the burial site of Confederate soldiers killed at the Battle of Fort Sanders), Calvary remains the only Catholic cemetery in Knoxville. Annually on the first Sunday of November, which this year will fall on All Souls Day itself, we gather at Calvary Cemetery as a community to recite the Rosary together for the eternal rest of all those buried there and for all the faithful departed. 

19 Years

This particular day, brothers and sisters, is a serious warning to me to think very carefully about the burden I carry. Even if I have to think about the weight of it day and night, still this anniversary somehow or other thrusts it on my consciousness in such a way that I am absolutely unable to avoid reflecting on it. And the more the years increase, or rather decrease, and bring me nearer to my last day, which of course is undoubtedly going to come some time or other, the sharper my thoughts become, and ever more full of needles, about what sort of account I can give for you to the Lord our God.

Thus spoke Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) introducing his sermon on the occasion of his anniversary of ordination as bishop (Sermon 339, tr. Edmund Hill, p. 388). Augustine was, of course, a bishop. His responsibilities and burdens as bishop far exceeded my much more modest ones. Still, the sentiments he expressed speak similarly to me on this 19th anniversary of my own priestly ordination.

Looking back at my ordination on a windy autumn Saturday afternoon at Saint Peter's Church in Toronto, Canada, I am amazed at how full these years have been. It is beyond my capacity to try to enumerate all the people and events that have significantly filled these years. The best I can do is to try to remember them all in a global sort of way during my retreat this week with the bishop and priests of the Knoxville Diocese and especially at Mass on this my anniversary day. 

“By virtue of ordination,” Servant of God Isaac Hecker wrote, “the priest becomes a conductor of God’s grace for the people.” 

What a joy and privilege that is! What a joy and privilege it has been for me these 19 years!

On Retreat

Every October the bishop and priests of the diocese go on retreat together. We all go to a wonderful place in North Carolina, which, while I wish it were a little closer, is otherwise an almost perfect place for this purpose. The diocese hires a retreat director, who gives conferences and does the other usual things that are associated with a priests' retreat. We pray Office and Mass together. The food is great, and there is a reasonable amount of relaxed time as well. And, of course, there is the company of one's fellow priests!

In my first assignment, the religious priests were not included in the diocesan priests' retreat. (Perhaps it was presumed our communities took care of all that already.) Here we are, and I am grateful for that. This will be my fifth diocesan retreat with the Knoxville presbyterate, and it is an event I find myself looking forward to more and more each year.