A reading of the holy gospel according to John. And Jesus proclaimed aloud, whoever puts faith in me believes not so much in me as in in as in him who sent me. And whoever looks on me is seeing him who sent me. I have come to the world as its light to keep anyone who believes in me from remaining in the dark. If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I am not the one to condemn him, for I did not come into the world to condemn it but to save it.
Whoever rejects me and does not accept my words already has his judge, namely the word that I have spoken. It is that which will condemn him on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own. No. The father who sent me has commanded me what to say and how to speak.
Since I know that his commandment means eternal life, whatever I say is spoken just as he instructed me, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. In the opening prayer today, we prayed for the eternal joy and to realize something of that joy in the holy Eucharist. That was the opening or the first oration. And the thought struck me how we have diminished, how we have lost strength in this concept of the joyfulness of the Eucharist or the liturgy or the mass.
Those words as I'm using them mean the same thing. The word Eucharist as a word means thanksgiving and gratitude. That's its basic meaning. And in the early church, when you read some of those early fathers and when you read how they gathered around to celebrate this liturgy, this Eucharist, this Thanksgiving, this expression of gratitude, it was adjoined with joy. It was a celebration.
Celebration means joyfulness usually. We may commemorate something when we go about in tears in the morning, but generally when we celebrate a birthday or something or other, there's absolutely a note of joyfulness. It's that there's an atmosphere and a climate of happiness, of laughter, of gaiety, of lifting up one's heart, a certain lightness even, benevolence towards those around us, all of these things which several times a year some of us may experience in our homes, but not every day. What I want to bring out is this. For some unknown reason, I have no idea.
Oh, I do. I do. I cannot lie to you. But we had we used to call the the the priest who said the mass the celebrant. Now we call him something like the president or something.
You know? And we don't we don't use these words anymore. We've substituted other words for them for various reasons. But are these reasons valid? Aren't we getting away from from something?
I know what the Latin word pre says means as well as most people. If I don't, I have a dictionary. But this this idea that when we come together as a family around the altar of Jesus Christ to celebrate the feast of thanksgiving, gratitude, Eucharist, they're all they're that's exactly what the word means, which, let me add, is associated with sacrifice. Now our holy father, in his letter of holy Thursday, he emphasizes this, that when we gather around for mass, it isn't just coming together as we do for a thanksgiving dinner. It isn't this to come together as a fine family and to encourage one another at which is all of this is very fine.
But you see there's been a downgrading of the concept of sacrifice. That the priest is at that altar in the person of Christ and that here you have Calvary repeated. It's not all fun and games. That idea has been depressed, you see, of late years. But we don't do but what is the meaning of the Eucharist if it isn't gratitude for for Christ?
And what did Christ do? He wasn't a YMCA leader, you know. He wasn't a master boy scout. He didn't bring people together just for the fun of getting them together. The Eucharist in the doctrine of the holy Roman Catholic church means sacrifice that that that the that Christ is the victim and the offering and the priest and even the altar.
And that the man in the the existential person who's standing up here in the person of Christ is the altar Christus, the other Christ. An outer doesn't mean one of several. It means the other of two. We have another word in Latin when we want to use the word for other. We have alios.
And so the the the mass, what we call the Eucharist, and I repeat, the word Eucharist means gratitude, thanksgiving, that's attached with joy. It is a celebration. What are you celebrating? Coming together? You could do that in on any bar on F Street.
You don't have to come to church to have a have a have a convivial union and to have some of these fine consequences of getting together, which are good. These are fine. I love to hear these fine drinking songs when fine stalwart young men get get together and sing joyfully in the union of their group. Good old Heidelberg, you know. But remember, Catholic worship has always been distinguished by the fact of the mass.
Now I can't tell you what the word mass means. We don't know what the word mass. We don't know its origin. I'm not at all opposed to eliminating that word, but I do not want to eliminate what we have been thinking down the centuries. Catholics come together for the Eucharist.
If you wanna use the word liturgy, fine, but put the put a big l for it. What do we do here? We join ourselves to Jesus Christ who is priest, victim, altar, repeating here what happened on Calvary. This is what we believe. This is the Catholic faith, and this is the Catholic doctrine.
Nothing more and nothing less. Nothing less. That's what you do when you come here in the morning. And I often I I think every morning when we pray for the church and when we pray united with the church, does that thought mean anything to you? Does that thought mean anything to our parishioners who are now sleeping for the most part?
That when they wake up, they'll say, I have been prayed for. Do they ever think about that? That we have a 06:45 mass here? That they are the church? That when we join our voices, when we join our actions, when we join our commitment here, we belong to this huge multitude of people.
And not just a church militant, as I said yesterday, the fighting church, but the church triumphant, Saint Catherine of Siena. And all those souls are in the intermediary state of, we call it, purgatory, who haven't just made it yet, but who are on the way. They have made it. This is the this is what we belong to. Do we does this mean anything to us, really?
Does it? Just two days ago, I was reading some stuff from Carl Jung, and it was a lecture he gave in England, and he really was giving unapologetic of why he wasn't a Catholic. But in the course of that lecture, he brought out I admit that this is a pragmatic approach, but that what Jung brought out was this, that in all his years of a practicing psychiatrist in Switzerland, where two thirds of the population is Protestant and one third is Catholic, in all those years he says he did not have or he had at the most six Catholic patients. He also says there that when a but he emphasizes practicing Catholic. Practicing Catholic.
The emphasis on practicing. Not a Catholic just merely a name. That doesn't mean a thing. So his talking about practicing Catholics, in all his years as a psychiatrist, he only had six at the most. And he said that when a Catholic comes to him with a problem, he sends them back to a practicing Catholic sends them back to a confessor because that's where their problem is.
And he has some magnificent words there on the Eucharist. Now he's looking at this thing simply from a point of view of what it means as a psychologist to to human beings, purely a pragmatic point of view. I do not think a whole lot of that point of view, but it is a point of view coming from Jung. Do we realize it? Here we are.
Here here is a I don't know I don't know whether I can't. He says he believed in some kind of a god, but he didn't know much about him. So we go to him to find out what we are doing and what its value is. Do we have to do that? So I repeat, life has its ups and it has its downs.
And there are a lot of downs and there are probably in many a life more downs than ups. That's for sure. Let us let's not put try to sweep this under the carpet. Carpet. And when we pray here as we do so often for the sick, I often think of those who aren't sick but who are taking care of the sick.
They need prayers too, believe me. And if only we Catholics could realize who we are and what we do, our lives would be changed, really. Maybe it's a matter of becoming something other than merely Catholics and becoming what Jung says, practicing Catholics. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.