Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies Podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you.
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John Glory to you, O Lord Jesus said to the crowds, no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him and I will raise him on the last day.
It is written in the prophets, they shall all be taught by God.
Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.
Not that anyone has seen the Father, except the one who is from God.
He has seen the Father.
Amen. I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.
I am the bread of life.
Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died.
This is the bread that came down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.
And the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.
The Gospel of the Lord what I want to say this evening is going to graze the gospel a little bit, but it's not going to be deeply rooted in today's gospel.
But I just recently had a phone conversation with a longtime friend of mine who I haven't seen in years, lives in the Western side of the US and he was talking about a book he read. For the life of me, I cannot remember the title right now, but the gist of the book was that first impressions matter more than we think, and he was relating to me because he had had a health problem that the author even suggested that there was a study done of doctors that get sued for malpractice, and the doctors that are, or at least come across in their initial meetings as empathetic and kind and likable tend to not be sued very often, and those that tend to be very blunt and matter of fact and don't come off very well tend to face the greatest amount of lawsuits immaterial of the medical problem that results.
So with that understanding, I'm going to give you my observations of the presentation of Pope Leo XIV today.
My first impressions? I will never sue him because there were several things that happened.
The first was his name that he chose, which has a profound significance.
When I was in graduate school, we would read many of the papal encyclicals, and the one that we read and studied the deepest is called Rerum Novarum, and that was put out by Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century.
And what Rarum Nivaram dealt with was codifying and defining Catholic social teaching, which is deeply, deeply rooted in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
And that what a disciple is called to is to model that love of Christ and Catholic social teaching is rooted in that.
The second thing that came across with me right away was that he looked petrified.
In other words, he looked deeply human.
And.
And to fully understand that, we looked up how long he has been a cardinal.
Less than two years.
He was first.
The first mention of it was in August of 2023.
So imagine if you would have said to him in July of 2023, well, in less than two months, you're going to be Pope.
He would have probably tried to get you committed.
Yet this is what happened.
And the fact that he said yes to this tells me he's deeply rooted in his faith, that in spite his fear and what I almost think could be his knocking knees, we heard he said yes because the Spirit of God called him, and that's pretty profound.
The third thing, and perhaps the most directly affecting me, I suggest you go back and listen to his words, because he emphasized pretty clearly that his vision of church is to include everybody, that there's no one that is outside.
All are welcome and wanted.
Which is why we chose this song today. It was almost unanimous among our staff. We got to do that.
Now, a little bit of inside baseball here. There are many in our church, including some in our own diocese, that say we shouldn't sing that song. We don't mean that.
Yeah, we mean it.
We mean it wholeheartedly. All are welcome.
And if there was any doubt, the Holy Father just said so, which, like I said, did my heart some good.
So first impressions are pretty powerful.
But perhaps the most powerful part of it was, is that he trusts God's presence and grace with him to give him whatever he's going to need to go through the coming days, weeks, months and years knowing full well that he's not ready, because nobody would be.
