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 A Thought On Sunday - "Your Sermon Darn Near Killed Us All"
From the desk of Fr. Ignatius c.p.
Sunday, May 2 2010
Earlier this year we took up a collection here in Mount Argus for Fr. Rick Frechette and the people he worked with in Haiti for 22 years.
He was born in 1953 at a time when many boys wanted to grow up to be a priest, a doctor or a fireman. Rick found that for him, choosing priesthood answered the questions all thinking people ask themselves at times, "What are we doing here? What is this life all about? What can I do with my life?” He later trained as a doctor as well!
But this good, dedicated, Passionist priest and doctor was not in Haiti when the earthquake struck on January 12 of this year. He was back home in the States with his dying mother but she and his family encouraged him to go back to the people who needed him more than they did. He did that but returned again at the end of January when she was close to death.
She died at the consecration of the mass he said at her bedside and during mass he had given a little talk on the merciful presence of Mary, who is with us, "now and at the hour of our death.”
 Some time later, he light-heartedly asked his father," I wonder did my talk do Mom in?” And his father answered immediately, "Your sermon darn near killed us all!"
I recall this because it says much about priesthood, the ordained priesthood and the priesthood of all the baptised. We see it in Fr. Rick who wanted to be priest and doctor to care for the bodily and spiritual needs of people and we see it in his mother and family who sent him back to those who were more lost and needy than they were. Though, I'm sure, they needed him too!
Last week, we had the funeral here of a lovely man, Mick Donnellen, and I read Jesus' story of the shepherd going out looking for the lost sheep and carrying the sheep home on his shoulders. I read this not because I thought Mick was a lost sheep but because he was so like that shepherd.
Often during his years in London, he almost literally carried a poor unfortunate home and gave him a bed for the night. That's the priesthood of the baptised. Mick was living the gospel, not just reading it or talking about it!
You could say we were all ordained at baptism to do priestly work, to bring the good news of the gospel to others, to witness to it by the way we live and to introduce people to Jesus, "Would you like to meet Jesus, my friend?”
If that's going to be real, Jesus needs to be real to us, someone we know, or want to know, in a real, personal, intimate way. Karl Rahner says if we preach or teach something we do not really believe, it is not just useless; it is positively harmful. We are spreading unbelief.
And he scourges the priest who waffles on with no real respect for the word he handles, “The word of God in the mouth of a priest empty of faith and love is a judgement more terrible than all poetic chatter in the mouth of a poet who is not really one. It is already a lie and a judgement upon a man, if he speaks of God when he is Godless."
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