Unless there is a Good Friday in our lives, there will never be an Easter Sunday. The Cross is the condition of the empty tomb, and the crown of thorns is the preface to the halo of light.

“Plunging into the Life of Christ what seemed to stare at me from pages of the Gospel was that Christ, the Son of God, did not come into this world to live. He came into it to die. Death was the goal of His life, the gold that He was seeking. … Unless there is Good Friday in our lives there will never be an Easter Sunday. The Cross is the condition of the empty tomb, and the crown of thorns is the preface to the halo of light…

When all is said and done, there are only two philosophies of life. One is the first the feast, then the hangover; the other, first the fast and then the feast. Deferred joys purchased by sacrifices are always sweetest and most enduring. Christianity begins not with sunshine but with defeat. Sunshine religions that begin with psychic elation, end often in disillusionment and despair…

I believe that the whole political and religious situation of the world can be summed up in terms of the divorce of Christ from His cross. Put the cross-less Christ on the right side, and the Christ-less Cross of Christ on the left. Who picks up the crossless Christ? Our decadent Western civilization. Christ is weak, effeminate, with no authority to drive buyers and sellers out of temples, and never speaks of self-discipline, restraint and mortification. Who picks up the Christless Cross? Russia and China, where there is a dedication to a common ideology, the use of discipline and authority to keep peace and order. But neither can heal.

The crossless Christ leaves men burdened with their guilt which festers in a thousand neuroses and psychoses. The Christless Cross cannot save for it ends in Dachau , the Gulag Archipelago and the squeezing of the lives of millions like grapes to make the collective wine of the State. Which will first find Christ with the Cross? The totalitarian states who have the Cross without Love, or the Western world which has love-so often erotic-without sacrifice? We do not know. But we do know that at the end of time, when the great conflict between the forces of good and evil takes place, satan will appear without the Cross, as the Great Philanthropist and Social Reformer to become the final temptation.

Ven. Fulton Sheen

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I give myself to God. Here is my body. Take it. Here is my blood. Take it. Here is my soul, my will, my energy, my strength, my property, my wealth – all that I have. It is Yours. Take it! Offer it! Offer it with Thyself to the Heavenly Father in order that He, looking down on this Great Sacrifice, may see only Thee, His Beloved Son, in Whom He is well pleased.

Transmute the poor bread of my life into Thy Divine Life; thrill the wine of my wasted life into Thy Divine Spirit; unite my broken heart with Thy Heart; change my cross into a Crucifix.

Let not my abandonment, and my sorrow, and my bereavement go to waste. Gather up the fragments, and as the drop of water is absorbed by the wine at the Offertory of the Mass, let my life be absorbed in Thee; let my little cross be entwined with Thy great Cross, so that I may purchase the joys of everlasting happiness in union with Thee.

Consecrate these trials of my life which would go unrewarded, unless united with Thee; transubstantiate me so that like bread which is now Thy Body, and wine which is now Thy Blood, I too may be wholly Thee. I care not if the Species remain, or that, like the Bread and the Wine, I seem to all earthly eyes the same as before. My station in life, my routine duties, my work, my family -all these are but the species of my life which may remain unchanged; but the substance of my life, my soul, my mind, my will, my heart – transubstantiate them, transform them wholly into Thy service, so that through me all may know how sweet is the love of Christ. Amen

+ Ven. Fulton Sheen

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“It is finished.” (Jn 19:30)

What is finished? The Redemption of man is finished. Love had completed its mission, for Love had done all that it could. Our Lord finished His work, but we have not finished ours.

He pointed the way we must follow. He laid down the Cross at the finish, but we must take it up. He finished Redemption in His physical Body, but we have not finished it in His Mystical Body. He has finished salvation, we have not yet applied it to our souls. He has finished the Temple, but we must live in it. He has finished the model Cross, we must fashion ours to its pattern. He has finished sowing the seed, we must reap the harvest. He has finished filling the chalice, but we have not finished drinking its refreshing draughts. He has planted the wheat field; we must gather it into our barns. He has finished the Sacrifice of Calvary; we must finish the Mass.

What was done on Calvary avails for us only in the degree that we repeat it in our own lives. The Mass makes this possible, for at the renewal of Calvary on our altars we are not on-lookers but sharers in Redemption, and there it is that we “finish” our work. He has told us: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself.” He finished His work when He was lifted up on the Cross; we finish ours when we permit Him to draw us unto Himself in the Mass.

+Ven. Fulton Sheen

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Look at your heart. It tells the story of why you were made. It is not perfect in shape and contour, like a Valentine heart. There seems to be a small piece missing out of the side of every human heart. That may be to symbolize a piece that was torn out of the Heart of Christ which embraced all humanity on the cross. 

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“I slipped His fingers, I escaped His feet,  I ran and hid, for Him I feared to meet.  

One day I passed Him, fettered on a Tree,  He turned His Head, and looked, and beckoned me. 

Neither by speed, nor strength could He prevail.  Each hand and foot was pinioned by a nail.  

He could not run or clasp me if He tried,  But with His eye, He bade me reach His side. 

For pity’s sake, thought I, I’ll set you free.  ‘Nay — hold this cross,’ He said, ‘and follow me.  This yoke is easy, this burden light,  Not hard or grievous if you wear it tight.’ 

So did I follow Him Who could not move,  An uncaught captive in the hands of Love.”

— Elizabeth Cheney

And  a meditation from Venerable Fulton J. Sheen:

We are at the end of a tradition and a civilization which believed we could preserve Christianity without Christ, religion without a creed, meditation without sacrifice, family life without moral responsibility, sex without purity, and economics without ethics. We have completed our experiment of living without God and have proven the fallacy of a system of education which calls itself progressive because it finds new excuses for sins.

Our so-called progressiveness, did we but realize it, is like unto the progressive putrefaction of a corpse. The soul is gone, and what we call change is only decay. How stop it except by reversing the process by which we drove God out of the world, namely by relighting the lamp of faith in the souls of men?…… [We must not] abandon creeds, and water down the milk of religion to a point where it would no longer nourish. The Catholic Church for one would never do that, because since its truths are God-made they cannot be man-unmade. We are trustees not creators of faith…[T]o all, may there come the full-visioned understanding of how souls are won to truth by the Cross.

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When you fail to measure up to your Christian privilege be not discouraged, for discouragement is a form of pride. The reason you are sad is because you looked to yourself and not to God; to your failing, not to His love. You will shake off your faults more readily when you love God than when you criticize yourself.

You have always the right to love Him in your heart, even though you do not love Him in your acts. Do not fear God, for perfect love cast out fear. God is biased in your favor! God is more lenient than you because He is perfectly good and, therefore, loves you more. Be bold enough then to know that God is on your side even when you forget to be on His.

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St. James the Apostle, special friend of Christ Jesus and companion even in the Garden of Gethsemane, was the first of the Apostles to die for the faith. The Church, through the suffering of her members, experiences the temptations Christ experienced in His Passion. In her martyrs, the Church emerges from the Passion victorious with Christ.

Ave Maria!

Mass: St. James – Feast

Readings: 
1st: 2Cor 4:7-15
Resp: Ps 126:1-2, 2-3, 4-5, 6 0
Gsp: Mt 20:20-28

Excerpts of Ven. Fulton Sheen’s book The Divine Romance (1930) quoted in homily can be found at https://www.catholicgentleman.net/2017/02/the-passion-of-the-church/

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The world’s greatest need is great men, someone who will understand that there is no greater conquest than victory over oneself; someone who will realize that the real worth is achieved, not so much by activity, as by silence; someone who will seek the kingdom of God and His justice, and put in the actual practice the law that it is only by dying to the life of the body that we ever live to the life of the spirit; someone who will brave the taunts of a good Friday to win the joy of Easter Sunday; who will, like a lightning flash, burn away the bonds of feeble interests which tie down our energies to the world; who, with a fearless voice like John the Baptist, will arouse our enfeebled nature out of the sleek dream of unheroic repose; who will gain victories, not by stepping down from the cross and compromising with the world, but who will suffer in order to conquer the world. In a word, what we need are Saints, for Saints are the truly great men.

I assume without further ado that the grace of God is the one thing necessary, and that God will give the grace to those who do His will.

Venerable Fulton Sheen

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Ave Maria Meditations

What mysterious power is it that a mother has over a son that, when he confesses his guilt, she strives to minimize it, even when it shocks her heart…. The impure are rarely tolerant of the pure, but only the pure can understand the impure. The more saintly the soul of a confessor, the less he dwells on the gravity of the offense and the more on the love of the offender.

Goodness always lifts the burden of conscience and it never throws a stone to add to its weight. There are many sheaves in the field that the priests and sisters and the faithful are unable to gather in. It is Mary’s role to follow these reapers to gather the sinners in. As Nathaniel Hawthorne said: “l have always envied the Catholics that sweet, sacred, Virgin Mother who stands between them and the Deity, intercepting somewhat his awful splendor, but permitting his love to stream on the worshiper more intelligibly to human comprehension through the medium of a woman’s tenderness.”

Mary will assist us if we but call upon her. There is not a single unhappy soul or sinner in the world who calls upon Mary who is left without mercy. Anyone who invokes her will have the wounds of his soul healed. Sin is a crime…but the Blessed Mother is the refuge. Saint Anselm said that she “was made the Mother of God more for sinners than for the just”, which could hardly be doubted, since our Lord Himself said that He came not to save the just but to call sinners to repent.

Venerable Fulton Sheen

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Unless there is a Good Friday in our lives there will never be an Easter Sunday. The Cross is the condition of the empty tomb, and the Crown of Thorns is the preface to the halo of light. When all is said and done, there are only two philosophies of life. One is first the feast, then the hangover; the other, first the fast and then the feast.  Deffered joys purchased by sacrifices are always sweetest and most enduring.

Christianity begins not with sunshine but with defeat. Sunshine religions that begin with psychic elation, often end in disillusionment and despair. So essential is dying to self the prelude to the true life of self, that there were three monumental attempts to force Christ to abandon His Cross.

If we leave the Cross out of the life of Christ, we have nothing left, and certainly not Christianity. For the cross is related to our sins. Christ was our “stand in” on the stage of life. He took our guilt as if He were guilty and thus paid the debt that sin deserved, namely, death. This made possible our resurrection to a new life in Him.

Christ, therefore, is not just a teacher or a peasant revolutionist, but our Savior. Our modern world does not like the word “sin”. What is forgotten is that sin is not the worst thing in the world. The worst thing is the denial of sin. If I am blind and deny there is any such thing as light, I shall never see. If I am deaf and deny sound, I shall never hear. And if I deny there is sin, I make forgiveness impossible.

Venerable Fulton Sheen

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