Christ Alive for Us in the Church

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Saint Michael’s Abbey

Silverado, CA 27

September 2026

1 Cor 1, 4-8

Mt 9, 1-8

Sermon

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It is the source of deepest joy for me to offer the Solemn Pontifical Mass in this most beautiful Abbey Church at the historic and joy-filled time of the Abbatial Blessing of Father Abbot John Caronan. The offering of the Pontifical Mass according to the More Ancient Usage of the Roman Rite is most fitting for a Norbertine community during such historic days, for the study of the history and spirituality of the Canons Regular of Prémontré affirms: “The essential place of divine worship in Norbertine communities is the most precious part of the spiritual heritage bequeathed by Norbertines of the past, and it is an inexhaustible source for communities of the present and the future.”[1] I am offering the Holy Mass for the Norbertines of Saint Michael’s Abbey and all who, in any way, are united to the life of the Abbey.

In the Collect of today’s Mass, we have prayed that the mercy of God may direct our hearts, for, without the help of His grace, we cannot please God, we cannot know, love and serve Him as we ought. Our prayer is made with acute awareness of our many faults and sins, and, at the same time, with total confidence in God’s never-failing mercy toward us. In the Introit, recalling the promise of eternal salvation, which God has made to us through the Prophets, we have prayed: “Give peace, O Lord, to them that patiently wait for Thee, that Thy prophets may be found faithful.”[2]

The peace for which we pray is the fruit of a pure conscience, of a heart which is attuned to the voice of God and ready to do all that He asks of us. As Blessed Ildephonse Schuster instructs us, our longing for peace should not be centered upon material realities with which God blesses us “only in so far as they advance the salvation of the soul.”[3] He continues: “This salvation, through grace, is the true object of our hope, which must be firmly and immovably fixed on the goodness of God.”[4]

Our prayer is offered in the time between the First Coming of Our Lord through the mystery of the Redemptive Incarnation and His Second Coming on the Last Day. While we are on earth, we are on pilgrimage to our true and final home which is with God in Heaven. Saint Paul, observing the Christian life of our ancestors in the faith, the first Christians at Corinth, gave thanks for “the grace of God which was given [to them] in Christ Jesus.”[5] He saw how the manifold gift of God’s grace in their lives was inspiring and sustaining them as they were awaiting the Final Coming of Christ. Knowing that the time of our earthly pilgrimage is a time when Satan and his cohorts tempt us to doubt, to fear, to give way to confusion and error, and to abandon the pilgrimage, Saint Paul assured the Corinthians: “God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”[6]

Throughout the centuries, the Church has never ceased to look for the Second Coming of the Lord. As Saint Peter reminds us: “But according to [God’s] promise we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.”[7] We look for Christ’s Coming, profoundly conscious that, in the words of Saint Peter, “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”[8] We wait, therefore, knowing “neither the day nor the hour”[9] of Our Lord’s Coming but certain that He will come to restore us and all of creation to God the Father, in accord with the Father’s saving will.

We are deeply conscious of all the manifestations of the immeasurable grace of Christ at work in the Church, preparing her for His Final Coming. One thinks of the miracles of grace in the lives of so many saints and blesseds along the Christian centuries. One thinks of the abbeys and monasteries in which the religious embrace the whole world with divine love through their lives of prayer and penance. One thinks of the priests sacramentally conformed to the person of Christ, Head and Shepherd of the flock at all times and in every place, to exercise His pastoral charity for the glory of God and the salvation of countless souls. One thinks of the shrines, the places of pilgrimage, in which Christ works innumerable miracles, both physical and spiritual. In our own personal lives, we are witnesses to the power of prayer, devotion and, above all, the Sacraments to overcome our sins and to keep us secure on the path which leads to eternal salvation, to our lasting home in Heaven.

In the time of pilgrimage, there remains always the temptation to leave the way of Christ, the temptation to the vice of pride which deceives us into thinking that we are the masters of our own existence, of our own destiny. It is the ultimate foolishness described in the Psalms: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’.”[10] Once we have given way to pride, a host of other vices enter into our lives.

Sadly, in our own time, we are the witnesses of a pervasive secularization of life. So many, in our world, live, in the words of Pope Saint John Paul II, “as if God did not exist.”[11] Such godless living leads, not to the peace which comes from doing God’s will, but to the violence and death which are the fruit of our rebellion against God and His Law written in nature and inscribed upon every human heart. Our time, as Pope Saint John Paul II repeatedly insisted, demands that we take up a new evangelization: to teach the Catholic faith, to celebrate the faith in the Sacraments and their extension through prayer and devotion, and to live the faith through the practice of the virtues, as if for the first time, that is, with the engagement and energy of the first disciples, of the first missionaries to our native place.

We must never lose heart. We are truly like the paralytic whom Our Lord cured in today’s Gospel. We have encountered Christ alive for us in the Church. He has washed away our sins and given us the pledge of eternal life in the waters of Baptism. He forgives our sins through the Sacrament of Penance, and He sustains His life within us through the Holy Eucharist, the Heavenly Bread of His true Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. Although we carry the signs of our former state of spiritual illness and death, we have indeed been healed. Christ is alive and at work within our souls through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Before the tremendous challenges to the life of faith in our times, we turn with confidence to Christ alive for us in the Church, Christ who has raised us from the bed of our spiritual infirmity, to Christ who strengthens us to do the will of Father in all things.

From the glorious-pierced Heart of Jesus, there never ceases to flow out upon the world and into our souls the immeasurable grace of the Holy Spirit. If we turn to Christ, if we give our hearts to Him, we can be confident that He will win the victory of our eternal salvation, even in the fiercest of battles. We must recognize the great evils which beset our culture, but we must not be defeated by them. Rather, recalling the sign of the cure of the paralytic, we must trust that, if only we give our hearts to Christ, these evils will be overcome by the infinitely greater power of His truth, His goodness, His beauty.

The Mother of God, Mary Immaculate, who first received the Redeemer into the world, is both our example in giving our hearts, one with her Immaculate Heart, into the Sacred Heart of her divine Son. At the same time, she continues to be the intercessor, the instrument, by which His saving grace reaches us and our world.

Let us now lift up our hearts, one with the Immaculate Heart of Mary, to the glorious- pierced Heart of Jesus through His Eucharistic Sacrifice. Let us be confident that, from His Sacred Heart, there flows unceasingly and without measure the grace of the Holy Spirit, which overcomes sin in our lives and in the world, and prepares us and the world for the Coming of the Lord. Let us pray, once again, with confidence: “Give peace, O Lord, to those who patiently wait for thee, that thy prophets may be found faithful.”[12]

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Raymond Leo Cardinal BURKE

[1] “La place essentielle du culte divin dans les communautés prémontrées constitue la part la plus précieuse du patrimoine spirituel légué par les Prémontrés d’hier, et une source intarissable pour les communautés d’aujourd’hui et de demain.” Bernard Ardura, Prémontrés Histoire et Spiritualité (Saint-Étienne, France: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 1995), p. 525. English translation: Bernard Ardura, The Order of Prémontré: History and Spirituality, tr. Edward Hagman, ed. Roman Vanasse (De Pere, WI: Paisa Publishing Co., 1995), p. 611.

[2] “Da pacem, Domine, sustinentibus te, ut prophetae tui fideles inveniantur.” “Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Introit,” in Gaspar Lefebvre, Saint Andrew Daily Missal with Vespers for Sundays and Feasts (Bruges, Belgium: Biblica, 1962), p. 742.

[3] “… solo in relazione alla salvezza dell’anima.” A. I. Schuster, Liber Sacramentorum. Note storiche e liturgiche sul Messale Romano, Vol. V (Torino-Roma: Casa Editrice Marietti, 1930), p. 186. [Hereafter, Schuster]. English translation: Ildefonso Schuster, The Sacramentary (Liber Sacramentorum): Historical & Liturgical Notes on the Roman Missal, Vol. III (Parts 5 and 6), tr. Arthur Levelis-Marke (Waterloo, ON: Arouca Press, 2020), p. 168. [Hereafter, SchusterEng].

[4] “Questa salvezza dell’anima per mezzo della grazia, forma l’oggetto della nostra speranza, la quale vuole essere ferma, solidamente poggiata sulla bontà di Dio.” Schuster, p. 186. English translation: SchusterEng, p. 168.

[5] 1 Cor 1, 4.

[6] 1 Cor 1, 9.

[7] 2 Pet 3, 13.

[8] 2 Pet 3, 8.

[9] Mt 25, 13.

[10] Ps 14 [13], 1.

[11] “ … etsi Deus non daretur.” Ioannes Paulus PP. II, Adhortatio Apostolica Post-Synodalis Christifideles Laici, De vocatione et missione Laicorum in Ecclesia et in mundo, 30 Decembris 1988, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 81 (1989), p. 454, n. 34. English translation: Pope John Paul II, “Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles Laici, ‘On the Vocation and the Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World’,” 30 December 1988, Apostolic Exhortations (Trivandrum, Kerala, India: Carmel International Publishing House, 2005), p. 895, no. 34.

[12] Cfr. footnote no. 2.