BIG C CATHOLICS

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. Director, La Salette Shrine Enfield, NH ( Click here for today’s readings )  Before my present assignment, I was pastor in a small parish in Vermont. The former pastor, Fr. Paul, lived with me, and one of his greatest interests was his garden, one of the most famous in town, not huge—just four raised beds—but always early and always lush. One of the secrets of his success was the soil, just the right mix of soil and his own rich home-made compost, completely organic, no chemicals. Just like the fourth illustration in the Parable of the Sower. Not for nothing he used to say he never felt so close to God as in his garden. I don’t suppose the yield was a hundredfold, but there were plenty of fresh vegetables through the summer, and plenty for canning and freezing. (My specialty was soups.) We ate well on a very moderate budget. One thing Fr. Paul couldn’t plan. The weather. If it was dry, he could water his garden. If it was too cold, the eggplants wou

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. Director, La Salette Shrine Enfield, NH (Click here for today’s readings)   When you hear the expression “sins of the flesh,” what kind of sins do you think of? That’s what I thought. Do you suppose that was all St. Paul had on his mind when he wrote to the Romans, “We are not debtors to the flesh, to live according to the flesh”? Remember what he wrote to the Galatians about what he calls the “works” of the flesh. The list is impressive, fifteen sins. Yes, it includes   impurity and licentiousness, but also idolatry , rivalry, factions, outbursts of fury, and selfishness, to name only half of them. What these all have in common is that they take what is good and honest in our nature and then twist them and distort them. Let me give a few examples to explain what I mean. Impurity and licentiousness are a distortion of the natural and beautiful mutual attraction between men and women. Selfishness is a distortion of appropriate self-esteem. F

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. Director, La Salette Shrine Enfield, NH ( Click here for today’s readings )  I wonder how long I will be remembered after I die. I wonder, too, what I will be remembered for. Shakespeare wrote, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” What would you like to be remembered for? What do you think you will actually be remembered for? You might have to write your memoirs to ensure that the answer to both questions is the same. What will guarantee that remembrance? Photos? Mementos? The day will surely come when someone will look at those pictures and say, “They should have written the names on the back.” And the mementos will end up in a box and someone for whom they no longer have meaning will one day discard them. A monument would be nice! The Statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial was sculpted by Daniel Chester French. It’s a “memorial” precisely because it guarantees that Lincoln’s

  Fr.  René J. Butler, M.S. Director, La Salette Shrine Enfield, NH ( Click here for today’s readings ) There is a stained-glass window in Blessed Trinity Church in Orlando, Florida, designed by James Piercey. It represents the Trinity, but is not easy to make out the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. With a little effort one can find the head of a dove near the center, and a hand above and behind it. They represent respectively the Spirit and the Father. It’s much harder to find the Son, a man’s face. Eventually you find the eyes, and the nose, mustache, and lips. But when you see the dove, you lose the face; when you see the face, you lose the hand, and none of them is completely delineated. All three are lost when you focus on colorful rays, which represent the one divine essence of all three Persons and fill the whole image. This image may not suit everyone’s taste, but I find it fascinating. I use it to illustrate the fact that although we attribute certain qua

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. Director, La Salette Shrine Enfield, NH ( Click here for today’s readings )  Has it ever struck you as strange that the disciples were gathered “when the time for Pentecost was fulfilled,” i.e., on a Christian feast,? There couldn’t have been any Christian feasts yet, so soon after the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus. The explanation is simple. The feast we celebrate today already existed long before the time of Jesus. It was not unlike our Thanksgiving, a harvest celebration, celebrated fifty days (seven weeks) after Passover. In the Old Testament it is called the Feast of Weeks. Be that as it may, for us Pentecost means only one thing: the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Lord. The Spirit’s first appearance in the Bible is in the second verse of the the first book: “The earth was formless and void... and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” The Spirit’s last appearance in the Bible is in R

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. Director, La Salette Shrine Enfield, NH (In New Hampshire the Solemnity of the Ascension was celebrated last Thursday. This homily is based on the readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter: Acts 1:12-14; 1 Peter 4:13-16; John 17:1-11.) ( Click here for today’s readings )  There is a saying you may have heard, which goes, “If you were accused of being a Christian, would they find enough evidence to convict you?” I don’t much like it, actually, because of its accusatory tone, but it certainly fits the context of today’s second reading from 1 Peter, which reflects a time when believers were in fact being punished for the crime of being Christians. There are not a lot of reliable statistics about the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, but there is ample evidence of the fact. For example, Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor in what is now northern Turkey, wrote the following to the Emperor Trajan around the year 111 AD: “In the case of those

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S. Director, La Salette Shrine Enfield, NH ( Click here for today’s readings )  All of us, at one time or another, have experienced deep disappointment. In this context, today’s words of St. Peter take on a special meaning: “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.” When I started my theology studies, that was the very first text quoted in my very first class. Forty-five years later, these words have not lost their resonance. The explanation we give for our hope will, ideally, be personal.   It really isn’t enough to say, “That’s what I was taught.”   Yes, of course there are reasons common to all believers, but we have our own reasons, too.   At some point, the hope we were taught became our own hope, probably at the moment when we realized that we really did believe in the Jesus Christ we profess in the creed.   Can you remember when that was? Maybe it happened gradually, like the coming of sprin