BIG C CATHOLICS

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) We live in a strange world, don’t we? So many people begin things with good intentions, wonderful visions, and really want to make things better, both in their own lives and in the lives of others. Marx and Lenin, the fathers of communism, really wanted to make the lives of their countrymen better. We went to war in Vietnam with good intentions. Atomic energy was supposed to make the world a better place. But, as in so many great efforts, things are likely to eventually go wrong. The same is true in our own personal lives. People fall in love and get married with nothing but the best of intentions, with high hopes, with hearts filled with love, and with wonderful visions. Then, somewhere along the line, things turn sour. Life is mixture of good and evil. We are imperfect people living in an imperfect world. There’s much in our nation that is both good and bad. Our governmental officials are both good

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) When it comes to facing failures in life, the farmer in today’s Gospel parable sounds a lot like many of us. We work hard, and only sometimes succeed. Most of the best things that we give to others are not by them well received. Most of what we want to plant in the lives of those around us doesn’t “take”; it doesn’t become rooted and permanently planted in their lives. All of us have to deal with failure, those areas where the best we’ve given to others comes up lacking, falling short of our hopes, our dreams, and our great expectations. There are some biblical commentators who suggest that the parable of Jesus we just heard was autobiographical. That may well be true. Jesus certainly had to face a whole lot of apparent failure. He knew full well the pain of failure: •  He was born and raised in Nazareth and his own hometown folks rejected Him. •  His own Hebrew countrymen rejected His message.

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) Most people that we know are carrying heavy burdens these days. Anxieties and fears burden us all, fears about our economy, the cost of food and fuel, home values and mortgages, what’s happening to our children, terrorism, our national debt, and so on. The list seems both overwhelming and endless. People are trying to stretch out paychecks, paychecks that never seem to go quite far enough. They are working on stressed marriage relationships they fear are breaking up. They’re unemployed or they’re under-employed and are looking for a better job that will give them a reliable and adequate source of income. Others are waiting for biopsy reports on certain abnormal cells that are growing in their bodies, filled with fear that they may have cancer. Or they’re trying to provide for and shape the characters of their children, children that are so influenced by all that is immoral and degrading in our culture.

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) When I was a little boy and went to my catechism lessons the nuns, our teachers, used the famous Baltimore Catechism for their teaching guide. Many times, they required us to memorize parts of the Baltimore Catechism and today I want to begin with its first section in which the question was asked: “Why did God make you?” The answer we memorized was: “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.” Later on we had to memorize the Ten Commandments, and the first one was: “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me. In the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus, we find God speaking to Moses about the covenant between God and His people. God tells the Hebrews: “You shall not worship any other god, for the LORD is the Jealous One; a jealous God is he.” (Exodus 34:14) In the New Testament’s Book of Acts we learn of St. Pau

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) Sparrows are the most common and the most plentiful of all birds. This being so, they are not valued very highly at all. If as a species they were becoming extinct you can safely bet, however, that committees and campaigns would spring up to save them. But what about human life? There are over eight billion human beings alive on this earth today. In this century, more than in any other century in human history, human life is less and less valued. Paradoxically, our contemporary society is committed to individual rights, to individual expression and personal choice, to the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the sexual revolution as no other generation in human history. But what about commitment to the right to life? Perversely and paradoxically, the people of this century are given to abortion and euthanasia as never before. Human life is disposable on a scale never before known to man

Fr. Charles Irvin Diocese of Lansing ( Click here for Sunday’s readings ) At the sight of the crowds, as we heard moments ago, Jesus was moved with pity; He had compassion for the crowd of humanity in front of Him. They were lying prostrate with exhaustion. Jesus of course saw that they were not just physically exhausted. More importantly He saw they were spiritually flattened and empty. Lost and leaderless, they were like sheep without a shepherd not knowing where to find what they needed to sustain them in the life of God’s Spirit. Our spiritual world is much the same as theirs. Even though science and technology along with our transportation and communications industries have moved us much closer together in what we’ve come to call “The Global Village”, we are as divided and fragmented as ever… as lonely and as isolated as generations of humans who have lived before us. Our fragmented and divided world, our violent inhumanity toward or fellow humans, is the constant report

June 11th While they were eating, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and giving it to his disciples said, "Take and eat; this is my body." Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, "Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins." — Matthew 26:26-28 O God, who in this wonderful Sacrament have left us a memorial of your Passion, grant us, we pray, so to revere the sacred mysteries of your Body and Blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption. Who live and reign with God the Father and with the Holy Spirit, one God, forever. Amen. ______________________________________________________ Today's celebration of the Body and Blood of the Lord originated in the Diocese of Liege in 1246 as the feast of Corpus Christi. In the reforms of Vatican II, Corpus Christi was joined with the feast of the Precious