11/22/2020

Dear St. Joseph Parish Family,

Today we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday before Advent. This feast is a new one instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925. He instituted the feast of Christ the King to counter growing secularism in the world, especially communism. As many nations drifted away from recognizing the authority of God, Pope Pius XI warned that those nations would thereby weaken their foundations and lose respect for human dignity and the common good. This feast is meant to remind people that Christ is the rightful sovereign of all creation, and that to forgot or ignore God is to deny the most fundamental truths about the world and who we are. Whenever one ignores essential facts about reality then reality has a way of reasserting itself in unpleasant ways! Pope Pius XI did not mean that nations should enact some form of theocracy, but that if a society, both publicly and in the private lives of its citizens, lose the sense of God and His Law, then disaster would follow. Therefore, today we give thanks to Christ the King for His mercy and His sovereignty– for in His love and wisdom He has saved us.

This week we also celebrate Thanksgiving. This 2020 Thanksgiving will be difficult – it’s not a year many people are thankful for unless to be thankful that we will never have another 2020. However, despite the difficulties, it is still important to have gratitude for what we do have. Gratitude is not simply a sentiment we try to emote because people say it’s good for us, but it’s a recognition of what God has done and is doing in our lives. 

Some see gratitude as merely a listing of the small pleasures we’re happy to have at hand, but at its root, gratitude is thankfulness that God is at work for our salvation. We should be thankful even for the crosses we bear because God in His mercy renders the evils we suffer sources of our healing and salvation when we unite in our suffering to Christ in faith. So even in this most difficult of years let us thank God for having not abandoned us, for indeed He is with us always, even until the end of the world. For that is our hope: not that every year will be better in material or emotional terms, but that even the bad years are but the stages of our pilgrimage to our true homeland in heaven. Our hope is not in sentimental niceties, but in God’s mercy that is present even in the most challenging and daunting realities we face. Let us give thanks that God’s grace is with us, even when the whole world totters around us. 

That being said, I’m still thankful that toilet paper is in steady supply!