by Father Richard G. Cipolla
I retired as pastor of St. Mary's parish in Norwalk, CT, and my last Solemn Mass was on June 24 and my last Missa Cantata as pastor was on June 29, the great Roman feast of SS. Peter and Paul. The Sunday Mass was glorious in all ways: the music, the participatio actuosa of the congregation and the 32 altar servers and the ministers of the Mass, the reception that afternoon was an outpouring of joy and affection that I will always remember.
I believe that the Traditional Movement in the Catholic Church, which appellation leaves something to be desired, is so very important to the future of the Church. I nevertheless believe that there is too much heady talk and almost no heart. What is lacking is contained in Newman's motto: Cor ad for loquitur: heart speaks to heart. This blog serves a very important purpose in the current struggle against the forces of a Catholic secularism that threaten the very foundation of the Catholic faith.
I will not dwell on this situation, lest this piece become another one of my forays against those within the Church who threaten to make the Catholic Church into a pale and vapid form of Protestantism that would be a shadow compared to the real but defective faith of a Protestantism that at least believed in the Evangelium Ipsissum Jesu Christi. But the hearts of men and women will be won over not only by intellectual discourse, but also by happy times over food and good wine.
I realized this past week that for so many years all I read and pondered was theology, in all of its manifestations. I had abandoned the treasury of literature that was inspired positively mostly and even negatively by a vigorous Christian culture. Just a few days ago, while culling my too large library, I came across a paperback translation of Flaubert's Three Tales. I admit that I had always meant to read Madame Bovary but never got around to it. So I decide to read these tales, partly because they did not carry the weight of a tome by Dostoevsky. The first story is called the Simple Heart. To summarize it is to destroy its beauty. It tells the story of an illiterate peasant. whose name is Felicité, who becomes the maid in a bourgeois household in mid 18th century France. The story assumes and takes place in a thoroughly Catholic culture, a culture that is far from ideal, but yet one in which an illiterate peasant serving girl could go to daily Mass and grasp in some way what this was about, because it was there for her. No Daily Missal, none of the means of reduction of the Mass to something to be intellectually understood. She was simple of heart, and so she understood in a way that we can no longer understand. One is here reminded of Romano Guardini's statement towards the end of his life that man is no longer capable of worship. That is another topic and another time in which to expound. But Felicité, the illiterate maid with a simple heart, was able to understand, and it is that simple ability to understand that has been nearly destroyed in the past fifty years by the liturgical iron curtain that holds our Catholic people in secular bondage.
It is with this singular introduction that I posted my last Sunday Sermon at Solemn Mass as Pastor of Saint Mary's Church in Norwalk, CT. I hesitated to post this sermon because it is so personal and deals with a particular parish in a particular part of the world. The topic of the sermon is Friendship as understood by a Christian. It is a sermon I had to preach, for Blessed John Henry Newman, my mentor and friend, who gave me the courage to become Catholic almost forty years ago, understood friendship so deeply. It is the friendships that I have been graced to enjoy in my years at St. Mary's, including the blogmaster of Rorate Caeli, that make the Love of God in Jesus Christ real and substantial. "O taste and see". This is ultimately about the Holy Eucharist and the Real Presence of Christ in that Sacrament.
But it also is and has to be about those relationships grounded in the Love of the Son for the Father that is the heart of what our Faith is about. For those of you who will be disappointed by my sermon, hoping that it will be a thunderous denunciation of the current state of affairs in Rome and in the Church in general, you will be sorely disappointed. This sermon is the attempt of a priest who knows his failings and limitations to link in a small way what he has experienced at the altar in the celebration of the Traditional Mass with the real expression and experience of that Love that is offered in the Mass.
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Sermon for Last
Sunday as Pastor of St. Mary’s church.
“This is my commandment, that you love
one another as I have loved you. Greater love
has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You
are my friends if you do what I command you. No
longer do I call you servants, for the servant[ does not know what his master is doing; but I have
called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known
to you”. (John 15:12-15)
Today we celebrate the birth of John the Baptist, the last of
the prophets, the forerunner of Jesus Christ and the first to die the death of
a martyr for the Truth who is the person of Jesus Christ. I must say that I am happy that my last
Sunday sermon as pastor of St. Mary’s is not on the feast of the Beheading of
John the Baptist, but rather celebrating his birth. There are those who might say that this feast
is fitting for my last Sunday sermon, because they may think that I bear a bit
of John’s personal zealousness.
The passage I chose for my sermon text is from Jesus’ Last
Supper discourse in the Gospel of John.
The context is the eve of his passion and death. It is introduced by the commandment to love
one another. It is only at this time that
our Lord addresses the Twelve as “friends”.
What does this word “friend” mean to most people today? The word itself has been in the process of
being cheapened for some time now, but surely the word is below water level
when its meaning has been sucked out by Facebook. The word, friend, in Latin is amicus, which comes from amare, the verb “to love”. Jesus goes on
to say: “No one has greater love than
this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And he says this to a group of
men, one of which will betray him, another deny him, and the rest, except for
John, will desert him out of fear.
When people used to write letters and took writing a letter
seriously, the meaning of friendship was often either the topic of the letter
or what was assumed in the act of writing the letter. I am not talking here of love letters, like
those between Abelard and Eloise or Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Those letters speak of affection that
includes the physical and sexual. When I
taught Latin in prep school, the first part of the second year course was
devoted to Cicero, that master of Latin prose.
We were obligated to plow through one of his orations. After that struggle, I made my students read
Cicero’s letters to his dear friend, Atticus.
These letters are simple and direct and as colloquial as Cicero ever
gets. The words of the letters show
forth a bond between these two men that has been formed ultimately by love. Listen to what Cicero says about friendship,
which words, by the way, had a great influence on the Catholic understanding of
friendship:
Friendship
is the greatest gift of the gods to men.
Friendship
Improves
happiness and abates misery by the doubling of
our joy and
the dividing of our grief. What
sweetness is left
in life if
you take away friendship? Robbing life
of friendship
is like
robbing the world of the sun. Love is
the attempt to form
a friendship
inspired by beauty. There can be no friendship without virtue.
When two people discover that their hearts can speak to each
other with no reservation or embarrassment, then there is formed the bond of
loving friendship.
My mentor and guide for a good part of my life, Blessed John Henry
Newman, who fostered in me thirty-six years ago the courage to become Catholic,
understood friendship so deeply. His
many letters to his friends almost make the reader jealous that he had these
deep friendships. He had these deep
friendships because he understood that the basis of friendship is virtuous love,
a love that must be self-sacrificial in behalf of the friend. He knew this because he knew the person of
Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.
Newman’s intellect was surpassed only by his generosity of
spirit. It is Newman above all who
taught me about friendship that is grounded in love, and it is also he who
taught me about those who resent that open generosity that is integral to
friendship because of jealousy, fear or resentment.
I have been so blessed in my twelve years at St. Mary’s with
the blessing of friendship. But it is
especially in the past three years as pastor that I have formed friendships that will endure beyond St. Mary’s and
will be part of me and a blessing for me until I die. These friendships have
been formed irrespective of age or ethnic background. What binds us is surely
our Catholic faith, our love of the Church’s liturgy, the person of Jesus
Christ who comes to us in the Sacraments and who is the center of our
understanding of love.
When I first became pastor of St. Mary’s, I was convinced
that I was pastor by accident. Then one day about a year and a
half ago, while celebrating Mas—don’t worry, no pious voices—I became intensely
aware that I was meant to be pastor of this particular parish and to lead it in
its special and singular mission to the Church: the recovery of the sacred in
the life of the Church in a muti-cultural, multi-ethnic and multilingual community. It Is here in the deepest sense that my life
and priesthood have met and kissed. My
life long love of art, my knowledge of church art and architecture, my love and
knowledge of music, especially the music of the Church ,without which I cannot conceive of living, my love of
Italian culture whose heart lies in the making of good food for those you love,
my love of teaching, my love of people and of long conversations with them,
which long conversations have been the bane of my wife’s existence. The question I have been asked for almost forth-eight years: why did you stay out so late?
My answer: I was talking. The
reaction: not very pleasant. My wife, Cathie, and my children Benedicta
and Nicholas learned the necessity of self-sacrifice as soon as I became a
Catholic priest, and I am so grateful to them for their personal sacrifice that
has allowed me to be everyone’s Father.
And I thank everyone in this remarkable parish for their love and
support these past years.
A few nights ago I organized a celebratory dinner for the
Viri Galilei, that group of men of all ages and all walks of life who in the
past three years learned the chant of the Church from someone who deeply
understands and loves the chant. They
sing the Missa Cantata every Wednesday evening and then sing Vespers in the
chapel. For me to know this group exists and that I am in some way a part of it
deepens my faith. At the celebratory
dinner, at my subtle coaxing, each man gave a toast. I was so proud of these men as only a
priest-father could be. Each man spoke with intelligence, feeling, humor, all a
reflection of their own transcendental experience of this group of Viri, this
group of men, whose manhood grounded in Christ and his Church shone through in
a time in which true virility is hard to find and is sadly difficult to find in
the clergy of the Church.
I begin to wind down this atypical sermon, not to say
peculiar, with two observations.
First: pastors retire. Priests do not. I shall do in the future what priests are
called to do: to offer the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass and to minister to people. I shall continue to preach, to
write, to lecture, to teach, all with the goal of the recovery of the sacred
memory of the Church as lived and experienced in the Traditional Roman Mass. Second. I must declare that I am a happy man
through the grace of God. Am I concerned
about the state of the Church and of the world?
Of course I am. But nothing can
take away the joy I know this day and every day, that joy that is founded on
what you and I do here in this Mass: to offer up Love to Love. In this context remember to respect and love
your new pastor, Father John Ringley. He loves Christ and his Church, he loves
the Traditional Mass, he loves music and is a hard worker.
I was tempted to end this sermon by quoting St Paul’s
words: bonum certamen certavi, cursum
consumavi, fidem conservavi. I have
fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. But no.
Those words are for a time in the future when two friends will dress me
in Mass vestments for the last time, and a Requiem Mass will be sung for me,
and at that time I shall be fully who I am, one who has died in the Lord. But
this not now. Not now. Nay rather, I shall close with a piece of prose and a
piece of poetry. The first is the ending of one of Newman’s most famous sermons
called “The parting of friends”, written
at a time when to become a Catholic in Protestant England meant the severing of
the ties of friendship.
And, O my brethren, O kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should you know any one whose lot it has been, by writing or word of mouth, in some degree to help you thus to act; if he has ever told you what you knew about yourselves, or what you did not know; has read to you your wants or feelings, and comforted you by the very reading; has made you feel that there was a higher life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that you see; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed; if what he has said or done has ever made you take interest in him, and feel well inclined towards him; remember such a one in time to come, though you hear him not, and pray for him, that in all things he many know God’s will, and at all times he may be ready to fulfill it.
And finally, George Herbert, Anglican priest and poet.
LOVE bade
me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
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Guilty
of dust and sin.
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But
quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
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From
my first entrance in,
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Drew
nearer to me, sweetly questioning
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If
I lack'd anything.
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'A
guest,' I answer'd, 'worthy to be here:'
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Love said, 'You shall be he.'
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'I, the
unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
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I
cannot look on Thee.'
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Love
took my hand and smiling did reply,
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'Who
made the eyes but I?'
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'Truth,
Lord; but I have marr'd them: let my shame
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Go
where it doth deserve.'
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'And
know you not,' says Love, 'Who bore the blame?'
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'My
dear, then I will serve.'
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'You
must sit down,' says Love, 'and taste my meat.'
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So
I did sit and eat.
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