Many people have recently asked me, “What is happening to the Church?” And i believe that I have a valid answer to that question. In my opinion, almost every single major problem the Church has flows from one central issue: Our spiritual health is deteriorating. In most places in the western world, Catholic Mass attendance is well below 40 percent. In other words, 60 percent of all Catholics willfully starve themselves spiritually, and an even greater number allow this to fester as the worthy reception of Holy Communion and the use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation is widely disregarded and abandoned. In other words, the overwhelming majority of Catholics in the United States and in the West have abandoned the sacramental life of the Church. And that sickness infects every aspect of our life: our finances, our institutions, vocations, outreach, and, yes, even the quality of our clergy. This is the root of what empties our convents, monasteries, seminaries, and closes our parishes. While we can ask ourselves important questions, such as: Did a falling sense of transcendence cause the fall in Mass attendance or did a fall in Mass attendance create a rush to make the Mass “more relevant” in order to retain those who stayed? the answer to that question is probably a little bit of both. People are widely discussing the quality of today’s clergy. But remember that the clergy does not come from a special and dedicated sector of society. We do not have a special priestly or Levitical tribe or state or town. Nor is priesthood something that is passed down from father to son. All Catholic priests have spent the first 25 or more years of their lives living among the ranks of the laity, and it is while living in the ranks of the laity, especially in their families, that they learned (or should have learned) the importance of prayer and selfless service, as we heard described in last week’s gospel. It is while living in their family unit that they should have learned the necessity of fidelity and chastity, and once the “Domestic Church” (the family) started coming undone, it affected everything it touched. From the Domestic Church comes the next generation of quality clergy, and with the deterioration of the family, it initiated a vicious downward cycle. Once the Domestic Church became a place where we became comfortable with sin, a clergy was produced that also was comfortable with sin. This, in turn, taught each succeeding generation to be more comfortable with sin, which, in turn, created more Domestic Churches, which became even more comfortable with sin, and so on. You see, the more comfortable we become with sin, the more uncomfortable we become with grace, and the more comfortable we become with sin, the more uncomfortable we became with Confession and Mass and the importance of receiving the Body and Blood of Christ. Perhaps this is why each succeeding generation drifts further and further away until many Masses in many parishes are primarily seas of gray hair. Perhaps that is why we see fewer couples marrying in the Church, fewer baptisms, fewer Catholic funerals, fewer students enrolled in Catholic education programs, and fewer faithful young men enrolling in our seminaries. In starving ourselves spiritually, we have as a Church become spiritually anemic. This is why I believe that a focus of the restoration of the Domestic Church is absolutely necessary to the restoration of the Catholic Church as a whole. This is why it is so very important that all families, especially those with children, must go to Mass together and receive Holy Communion. We must spend some regular time in prayer both as individuals and as a family before the Blessed Sacrament. We must marry in the Church that person with whom we want to spend the rest of our lives and raise our families. We must Baptize our children. We must have celebrated a Funeral Mass when we bury our dead. Our children must be Confirmed. We must not just ask that people pray for our sick; we must ask the priest to anoint our family members who are very sick. And, it is vital that all Catholics make better use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Too many people heard that you are only REQUIRED to go to confession when you have committed grave mortal sin, and since most of us have not murdered anyone recently, we do not HAVE to go to confession. What we seem not to have heard is that the Church ENCOURAGES frequent reception of Holy Communion and the frequent celebration of Reconciliation in order to receive the SANCTIFYING GRACE that comes with receiving the sacraments. And just what is sanctifying grace? it is, according to the catechism, ”The gratuitous gift that God makes to us of his own life, infused by the Holy Spirit into our soul to heal it of sin and to sanctify it.” That is why the Catechism of the Catholic Church (also in para. 1999) notes that sanctifying grace has another name: deifying grace, or the grace that makes us godlike. We first receive this grace in the sacrament of Baptism; it is the grace that makes us part of the Body of Christ, able to receive the other graces God offers and to make use of them to live holy lives. The Sacrament of Confirmation perfects Baptism, by increasing sanctifying grace in our soul. Sanctifying grace is also sometimes called the "grace of justification," as the Catechism notes in paragraph 1266; that is, it is the grace which makes our soul acceptable to God. If we can get families to quit starving themselves sacramentally, if we can get our families to desire grace over sin, and if we can get our families to fully accept the grace God wants to give them, IT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING for the better. Those families will become the way Christ will restore His Church. Those are the families that will produce the future clergy who will teach what has been taught to them–who have grown in an incubator of prayer, service, and fidelity and who will teach the necessity of such to the next group of burgeoning Domestic Churches. For my part, as a pastor of souls, I must emphasize this in the Mass, make this clear in our educational programs and activities, and make a clarion call to all families that fall under my pastoral care. We must do everything we can to strengthen our families as places of grace fed by the sacramental life of the Church. BUT, in order to do this, we must become people who are uncomfortable with sin and who seek comfort in the mercy and forgiveness of Jesus Christ. We must understand and believe that the superior way laid out by Christ necessitates that we abandon sin and embrace grace. I truly believe that by fully embracing the sacramental life of the Church, it will bring a springtime of growth, one which will replace the long winter of our discontent. But, it starts in the family; it starts with the laity; it starts within the Domestic Church.

The first Marian apparition in history appeared to Saint James the Apostle, the brother of Saint John the Evangelist, on the bank of the river Ebro in Saragossa, Spain. Unlike every other recorded apparition, this one took place during the earthly life of the Mother of God. According to tradition, she had promised Saint James that when he needed it most in his difficult mission to the pagans in today's Spain, she would appear to him to encourage him. In the year 40 A.D., while praying one night on the right bank, the Virgin appeared with the Child Jesus standing on a pillar and asked Saint James and his eight disciples to build a church on the site, promising that “it will stand from that moment until the end of time in order that God may work miracles and wonders through my intercession for all those who place themselves under my patronage.” The church of Our Lady of the Pilar in Zaragoza, is the first church dedicated to Mary in history and it remains standing to this day, having survived invasions and wars – in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 three bombs were dropped on the church and none of them exploded. Our Lady is also said to have given the small wooden statue of the apparition to Saint James which now stands on a pillar in the church. Nuestra Señora del Pilar is the patron of Spain and all Hispanic peoples. October 12, 1492, the feast of the Virgin of the Pillar, is the day Christopher Colombus first sighted American land, and when the first Mass in the Americas was celebrated.

This martyr and patron of France is regarded as the first bishop of Paris. His popularity is due to a series of legends, especially those connecting him with the great abbey church of St. Denis in Paris. He was for a time confused with the writer now called Pseudo-Dionysius. The best hypothesis contends that Denis was sent to Gaul from Rome in the third century and beheaded in the persecution under Emperor Valerius in 258. Before dying decapitated, Denis and his companions were said to have suffered terribly. These tortures inspired authors to produce texts and images. All preserved narratives are unanimous in affirming that saint Denis and his companions Rustique et Éleuthère were beheaded. According to one of the legends, after he was martyred on Montmartre—literally, “mountain of martyrs”—in Paris, he carried his head to a village northeast of the city. Saint Genevieve built a basilica over his tomb at the beginning of the sixth century.