Happy 5th Sunday of Easter! And a continued prayer of blessing for our new Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV. Long may he reign, and may he be for the universal Church a good and holy shepherd. I learned this past week that our new pope has a bit of history here in Genesee County. You may be aware that St. Matthew Parish in downtown Flint was at one time administered by the Augustinian Order, of which Pope Leo is a member. The Augustinians began their ministry there with the arrival of new pastor Fr. Mortimer Sullivan in 1926 and for nine decades they remained at St. Matthew until 2016. During the pastorate of Fr. Fred Taggart (1995-2015), then-Fr. Bob Prevost once subbed at St. Matthew during the summer of 1999 while Fr. Taggart took his annual retreat. Among the beneficiaries of his brief ministry was the family of Jim Skellet, a former teacher of St. Robert School and Powers High School, whose daughter was baptized by Fr. Bob. What a small world! So basically, what we gather from this information is that we’re on familial first-name terms with ‘Uncle Leo’, haha. I thought that was so cool and wanted to share the joy.
I mentioned in my homily last weekend that I was very impressed by Cardinal Prevost’s choice of Leo XIV as his papal name. He chose it in homage to his name-sake predecessor, Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 to 1903, during the explosion of the late industrial revolution. He was called to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a rapidly changing world whose technologies and means of commerce were undergoing seismic shifts, and whose people were often being swallowed by new, atheistic economic and social orders. Leo XIII composed the St. Michael prayer which we recite at the conclusion of each Mass. Our own Leo begins his papacy amidst the explosion of this current technological revolution, called to preach the Gospel in a rapidly changing world undergoing seismic shifts of economy, polity, and society, a world which very often swallows Christian notions of human dignity, morality, and truth. At his first papal Mass, Leo preached on Matthew 16, Peter’s proclamation of Jesus as the Christ, and included these remarks:
“Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure. These are contexts where it is not easy to preach the Gospel and bear witness to its truth, where believers are mocked, opposed, despised or at best tolerated and pitied. Yet, precisely for this reason, they are the places where our missionary outreach is desperately needed. A lack of faith is often tragically accompanied by the loss of meaning in life, the neglect of mercy, appalling violations of human dignity, the crisis of the family and so many other wounds that afflict our society.”
“Today, too, there are many settings in which Jesus, although appreciated as a man, is reduced to a kind of charismatic leader or superman. This is true not only among non-believers but also among many baptized Christians, who thus end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism. This is the world that has been entrusted to us, a world in which, as Pope Francis taught us so many times, we are called to bear witness to our joyful faith in Christ the Saviour. Therefore, it is essential that we too repeat, with Peter: You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Fr. Brian