In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Twenty-five years ago, today, this magnificent temple was consecrated as the House of God. God the Son Incarnate came to dwell within its walls for the first time. He has continued to dwell here to encounter without cease and without measure both the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration and the many pilgrims who come here to worship Him in the mystery of the Eucharistic Host, His true Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity given to us as the spiritual food for our earthly journey to our heavenly destiny. Above all, here He invites His children to build their lives upon the “rock” of Saint Peter’s Profession of Faith at Caeserea Philippi, declaring to Our Lord: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”[1]
Through the encounter with Our Lord here, both the Sisters and the pilgrims discover anew their own identity as “living stones” in the building which is Christ.[2]
Here Saint Paul, addresses each of us:
Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.[3]
Through our encounter with Christ at every celebration of the Holy Mass and its prolongation in Eucharistic adoration, we receive the grace of holiness of life beyond our capacity to describe. The cause of our joy today is the encounter with Christ in this church whose beauty draws our attention to the incomparably greater beauty of our life in Christ. This church is truly God’s dwelling with us in His only-begotten Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Drawn here by Our Lady and the whole company of the saints, we encounter her Divine Son Who heals us of sin and pours forth into our hearts, from His glorious-pierced Heart, divine mercy and love in unceasing and immeasurable abundance.
In this church, the solemn prayer of King Solomon on the day of the dedication of the first temple of the Lord is fully answered. Indeed here, in this place, God dwells on earth.[4]
Indeed here God listens to us with all His Heart from His heavenly dwelling and grants us the pardon of our sins.[5]
Here, God the Son Incarnate pours forth the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit from His glorious-pierced Heart into our poor and sinful hearts. He invites us to place our hearts completely into His Most Sacred Heart. In His Heart, He heals our hearts of sin and animates them with His pure and selfless love.
Worship “in spirit and truth” is God’s gift to us in Our Lord Jesus Christ Who has won for us the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit enlightening our minds to know the truth and inflaming our hearts to give ourselves in pure and selfless love of God and our neighbor.[6]
Christ, forever seated in glory at the right hand of the Father, is, at the same time, with us always in the Church, especially in the Holy Mass at which He makes sacramentally present for us anew the outpouring of His life on the Cross for our eternal salvation. At every celebration of the Holy Mass, in the Great Doxology at the conclusion of the Eucharistic Prayer, we acclaim the saving mystery of our encounter with Christ in the Eucharistic Sacrifice which is worship of God “in spirit and truth”: “Through him, and with him, and in him, O God almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, for ever and ever.”[7]
Every prayer and devotion offered in this church has its source in the encounter with Christ in the Eucharistic Sacrifice by which He opens His Heart to us and we offer our hearts totally to Him. Once He has made His sacrifice sacramentally present on the altar which is the axis of this church, Our Eucharistic Lord remains with us in the tabernacle to heal and nourish us at any moment of need or trouble and at the hour of death, and to receive our visits of adoration, thanksgiving, petition and expiation. Here, in the words of Saint Peter, we come to Christ the Great High Priest, “a living stone,”[8]
who builds us, “living stones”[9]
in Him, into “a spiritual house,”[10]
so that we may offer the “spiritual sacrifices”[11]
by which we give glory to God and give pure and selfless love to our neighbor.
Gathered for the Eucharistic Sacrifice in this House of God and of His holy Church, let us thank God for the manifold blessings which He has poured forth into the hearts of Christ’s faithful in this church from the day of its dedication on December 19, 1999. Let us thank God, in a particular way, for His faithful servant, Mother Angelica, foundress of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery of which the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament is an integral part. We cannot fail to recall how Our Lord Himself, through His representation as the Divine Child, made known to Mother Angelica His plan for the Monastery and for the Shrine: “Build me a temple, and I will help those who help you.”[12]
Through her obedient prayer and reflection upon the words which she heard while praying before the statue of the Divino Niño in Bogotá, Colombia, Mother came to understand that what she had envisioned as a “farm chapel” of a rural monastery was, instead, to be a place of pilgrimage in which the pilgrims would know in an extraordinary way the supreme reality of the Holy Eucharist in their ordinary daily life.[13]
We thank God for the generous benefactors who made possible the construction of the Monastery and Shrine. We thank God for the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration, and we thank Him for the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word who daily serve the spiritual needs of the Monastery and Shrine.[14]
The daily offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass by the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word and the continuous adoration of the Most Blessed Sacrament by the nuns of the Monastery are at the heart of the mission of the Shrine.
Mother Angelica understood that the monastery chapel and shrine church as a holy place of pilgrimage, sacred to the truth of the Most Blessed Sacrament, had to be built and furnished in the most beautiful and enduring manner possible. Everything about the shrine church should communicate its true identity as the House of God, the temple in which God the Son dwells with us to save us from sin and to save us for eternal life.[15]
The beauty of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament must be the vehicle by which pilgrims lift up their minds and hearts to know and to love and to serve our Eucharistic Lord, to be one with Him in His Eucharistic Sacrifice for the glory of God the Father and for the salvation of many souls.
Mother Angelica was a faithful, courageous, and tireless defender of the truths of our Catholic faith at a time when a lethal materialism and secularism, the work of Satan, “a murderer from the beginning” and “the father of lies,” had crept into the life of the Church.[16]
With all the guile of Satan, the servants of the culture of lies and death, attempted to relativize and erode the truths of the faith. As one would expect, the first line of the attack was the Sacred Liturgy, particularly the Holy Eucharist in which is “contained substantially,” as Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches us, “the common spiritual good of the whole Church.”[17]
Reducing and eroding faith in the Most Blessed Sacrament by reducing and eroding the teaching regarding the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, the beauty of churches and chapels and of the Roman Rite itself, and the richness of Eucharistic devotion as it had developed along the centuries led naturally to the reduction and erosion of faith in the hypostatic union of the two natures – human and divine – in the one Divine Person of Christ and of faith in the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ.
Mother Angelica saw how the false teaching was endangering the eternal salvation of souls. She did not spare herself, notwithstanding her physical and spiritual suffering, in defending the faith. Our Lady of the Angels Monastery with its Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament and Eternal Word Television Network are truly great works of her defense of the Catholic faith. Mother continues to work through those who faithfully carry out the mission as it was entrusted to her by Our Lord.
As we, with hearts filled with gratitude to God, rejoice in the anniversary of the dedication of this shrine church which is the heart of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery and a holy place of pilgrimage for many, let us all devote ourselves anew to the fulfillment of the high mission of the Shrine as it was entrusted to Mother Angelica. Let us pray for those who today serve the high mission of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament. Let each of us, according to our vocation and the special gifts which God has given to us, give ourselves to our Eucharistic Lord at His shrine here, so that it may always be a place in which pilgrims encounter Christ, come to know Him more fully and to love Him more ardently, especially in the Sacraments of Penance and the Holy Eucharist.
Let us now lift up our hearts to the glorious-pierced Heart of Jesus, open for us in the Eucharistic Sacrifice. Let us meet Him as He comes into our midst making sacramentally new the Sacrifice of Calvary, and let us, one in heart with the Immaculate Heart of His Virgin Mother, give our hearts completely into His Most Sacred Heart. May we and all pilgrims to this holy place encounter here Our Lord, in an extraordinary way, for the conversion of our hearts to Him and for the same conversion of the hearts of the many who do not yet know Him and of the many who have known Him and have then abandoned Him.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Raymond Leo Cardinal BURKE
[1] Mt 16, 16.
[2] Cf. 1 Pet 2, 5.
[3] 1 Cor 3, 16-17.
[4] Cf. 1 Kgs 8:27.
[5] Cf. 1 Kgs 8:30.
[6] Cf. Jn 4, 23-24.
[7] “Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso, est tibi Deo Patri omnipotenti, in unitate Spiritus Sancti, omnis honor et gloria per omnia saecula saeculorum.” “The Order of the Mass, The Eucharistic Prayer,” Daily Roman Missal, 7th ed. (Downers Grove, IL: Midwest Theological Forum, 2019), pp. 780-781, no. 98.
[8] 1 Pt 2:4.
[9] 1 Pt 2:5.
[10] 1 Pt 2:5.
[11] 1 Pt 2:5.
[12] Arroyo, p. 255.
[13] Arroyo, p. 280.
[14] Cf. Raymond Arroyo, Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles (New York: Doubleday, 2005), pp. 228-229, and 328. [Arroyo].
[15] Cf. Arroyo, pp. 257 and 292.
[16] Jn 8, 44.
[17] “… bonum commune spirituale totius Ecclesiae continetur substantialiter.” ST, III, q. 65, a. 3, ad 1. English translation: Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Tertia Pars, 60-90 [Volume 20 of Latin/English Edition of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas], tr. Laurence Shapcote (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute, 2012).