Second Sunday after Pentecost. And Sunday Within The Octave Of Corpus Christi.

Epistle. 1 St. John iii. 13-18. Dearly beloved: Wonder not if the world hate you. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not, abideth in death. Whosoever hateth his brother, is a murderer. And you know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in himself. In this we have known the charity of God, because he hath laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. He that hath the substance of this world, and shall see his brother in need, and shall shut up his bowels from him: how doth the charity of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word, nor in tongue, but in deed and in truth. Gospel. St. Luke xiv. 16-24. At that time: Jesus spoke to the Pharisees this parable: A certain man made a great supper, and invited many. And he sent his servant at supper-time to say to them that were invited that they should come, for now all things are ready. And they began all at once to make excuse. The first said to him: I have bought a farm, and I must needs go out and see it; I pray thee, have me excused. And another said: I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to try them; I pray thee, have me excused. And another said: I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come. And the servant returning, told these things to his lord. Then the master of the house, being angry, said to his servant: Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor and the feeble, and the blind and the lame. And the servant said: Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room. And the lord said to the servant: Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house maybe filled. But I say unto you that none of those men that were called shall taste my supper.

Sermon LXXXV. Holy Communion.

A certain man made a great supper and invited many. —St. Luke xiv. 16.

I suppose every Catholic here to-day, except some young children, has once or many times in his life been to the "Great Supper," and eaten the "Bread of Life" which is served at it; and those little ones of the Lord's Holy Catholic family are looking forward to the bright day, to be for ever afterwards the day of sweetest memory, when they too shall have that honor and happiness—the day of their First Communion.

If such be the case, what is the use of the church repeating to us every year the threat in the Gospel against those who made foolish and selfish excuses for staying away—"None of those men that were called shall taste of my supper"? We have been called. We have answered the invitation. We have been to the supper. Isn't that enough? The Gospel evidently does not apply to us. But wait a bit. I have two things for you to think about. In the first place, the calling to the Great Supper the Gospel speaks about is a standing invitation for life. By this I mean that the law of the Catholic Church obliges every one to receive Holy Communion annually—that is, during the Easter season. It is then, first of all, an annual invitation; and going one year is not answering the call for the next year. Every one who has learned his Catechism ought to know that. In the second place, what would you think of a near relative whom you had invited to be present at your marriage anniversary dinner, who should send for reply that he had already dined with you on the Fourth of July? This is like what people say who, when asked if they made their Easter duty, tell you, "Oh! no, I went at Christmas," or "I was at the mission." Now the annual marriage supper which the King makes for his Son, and to which we are invited, is at Easter, and neither Christmas, mission time, the Forty Hours, nor the Fourth of July will do, unless, indeed, the mission or the Forty Hours took place in the Paschal season.

The second thing I want you to think about is that the invitation to partake of the "Great Supper" of Holy Communion, whether at Easter or at any other time, is a call to make what is known as a worthy Communion; that is, you must be absolved from sin and thus be yourself worthy. That is requisite, and that is enough. There are some scrupulous people who fancy that they themselves have got to do beforehand all that the Communion is intended to do and will do. Who is it that prepares the Supper, they or the Lord? If they will do the little that is asked of them, they can safely leave to the Lord the responsibility of doing his part. A worthy Communion should also be one that is worth something to the one receiving it, and should not be a worthless exterior performance, which has no interior act of communion in the heart to correspond to it. And now this kind of worth of each and every Communion depends upon what the communicant chooses to make it. All is to be had that God can give. The means of getting the good from Communion is one and the same means for getting the good in receiving other sacraments—that is, prayer. Prayer beforehand, prayer daring it, prayer afterwards. The more you want and the more you ask of, the more worth will your Communion be. Suppose our Lord should suddenly quit the sacramental form of the host and ask a communicant at the altar-rail, "What do you wish for?" and he should answer, "I don't know; I never thought of asking for anything," you would reasonably conclude that he was not likely to receive very much. Now, I hope you who often come to the holy table are paying attention to this. If you come often, it is supposed, and justly supposed, that you want a good deal, and that you are deeply in earnest about obtaining what you desire. Much as, I am sure, your Communions are worth to you, I wish you would set about making them worth still more. In a word, you must think more about what you need. Get your requests ready. Have them, as it were, well by heart, so that if the Lord should ask you what you came for, your reply would come out quick and earnest enough. Of all privileges and honors, in this world, receiving Holy Communion is, indeed, something for us Catholics to boast of. How the "outsiders" envy us our faith and the comfort it brings to us!—the infidels of every name and kind, the Protestants and others, who either have no Communion, or at best a sham one. How would you like to have yourself thrust aside and one of them called by the Lord to take your place at his table? Beware, then, how you treat his invitation; come as often and be as well prepared as the Spirit of Divine Love shall inspire you.

Sermon LXXXVI. The Sacred Heart Of Jesus.

The month of June has, as you know, my brethren, been set apart by general consent for devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as that of May has in the same way been devoted to our Blessed Lady; and on next Friday, the day following the octave of Corpus Christi, the church solemnly celebrates the Feast of the Sacred Heart. This feast, formerly observed only in some places, has for about thirty years been kept everywhere.

As the devotion to the Sacred Heart has of late spread so widely in the church, and is so plainly pleasing to God and most salutary to us, it is well that we should understand it clearly, that we may enter into it more fully. In the first place, then, we will ask, What is the nature of the worship which we render to the Sacred Heart of Jesus? And, secondly, Why is it specially selected as the object of our devotion?

What, then, is the nature of our worship of the Sacred Heart? It is, of course, the same as that which we pay to our Lord himself—that is, the worship which is due to him as God the Son, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. His human nature, united to the divine nature in one Person, is truly worthy of divine worship and honor. God, having become man, his human heart is the heart of God, and must be adored as such. Let us, then, remember this: the devotion to the Sacred Heart is one that is given to God himself, just as that is which we have for the Blessed Sacrament in which he resides on our altars.

But why do we select the Heart of our Lord, or rather why has he himself selected it, as a special object of our adoration? I say, why has he himself selected it? for this devotion to the Sacred Heart in modern times is due specially to a revelation made by our Lord to the Blessed Margaret Mary, a nun of the Visitation, two centuries ago.

In answer to this question we may say that our Lord's Heart is the fountain of his Precious Blood, which was shed for our salvation, and was pierced by the lance, like his hands and feet by the nails, on the cross; and it is in this way specially pointed out as the object of our gratitude and love. But even a more urgent reason is that the heart is a natural symbol of love, agreed on by universal consent at all times and in all parts of the world, and therefore that the Heart of Jesus most perfectly represents his love for us. In adoring the Sacred Heart, then, we adore in a particular manner the love of Christ for sinners; and it is for this reason that he has given us this devotion, knowing that it is only by the thought of the love of his Heart for us that our hearts can be won to the love of him.

Yes, my brethren, God wishes our love; it was to obtain it that he became one of us and died for us on the cross; and it is to win it now that he asks us to remember and to adore his Sacred Heart. "Let us therefore," says St. John, "love God, because God first hath loved us." This is the spirit of this devotion: that we should not try to save our souls merely for the fear of hell, but that, seeing how much God has loved us, we should love him in return. And also that, seeing how much he has loved our brethren, the same fire of divine charity may be kindled in our hearts, and thus each one of us may do our share to carry on and to complete the work for which he shed his Precious Blood: the bringing of the world to the knowledge and love of him.

Sermon LXXXVII. Ingratitude.

A certain man made a great supper, and invited many. … And they began all at once to make excuse. —Gospel of the Day.

You know, my dear brethren, the parable given by our Divine Lord in the Gospel of to-day. The principal point of it is in the words which you have just heard. The guests who were invited to the supper, instead of feeling honored by the invitation and accepting it gladly, began to make one excuse or another; one had his farm, one his oxen, and another had just married a wife. None of these reasons would have prevented them from coming to the supper had they really wished to; they were mere flimsy pretexts put forward to hide their indifference to their host and to all that he had to offer them.

You know this parable, and I think you also know well its meaning. As our Saviour uttered it the coldness and ingratitude of those whom he had come to save rose up before him, giving him a foretaste of the agony which was afterward to overwhelm and crush him in the garden of Gethsemani. His heart, burning with love for men, longed and thirsted for love in return; it was all he asked; could he but have had that all the pains of his sorrowful life and terrible death would have been as nothing. But no; he foresaw that, after all, those to whom he stretched out his arms on the cross in loving invitation would, for the most part, turn a deaf ear to his appeal; would give him at the best but a reluctant and half-hearted service; would keep as much as possible for themselves, and give as little as possible to him.

And, in particular, he foresaw that the crowning gift which he had in store for his rebellious and ungrateful children—his own Body and Blood, which he was to leave them in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, and in which he was to remain with them even after his work was done and the time come for him to return to his Father—would be rejected by the greater part even of Christians with the same indifference with which his other sacrifices were to be met. He saw himself in our churches, unwelcomed and almost unknown by the most of those whom he loved to call his friends. He saw that, though for a time in the first fervors of faith, when the sword of persecution drove those to his side who were not overcome by it, he would, as he desired, indeed be the daily bread of his people, yet there would come a day when that faith would be dimmed, and the love which sprang from it would grow cold. He knew that an age would come when—shame to say it—his church would have to force her children by strict laws and threats of excommunication to receive him in the sacrament of his love even once a year. And he knew that, in spite of all this urging, many still would excuse themselves from the divine banquet, offered so freely to, nay, almost forced upon, them; that millions every year would miss their Easter duty; would either turn from the bread of life to the food of swine by deliberate choice, or at least would, on some frivolous pretext, put off the time of their reconciliation till the last day appointed for it had gone by.

Alas! my dear brethren, children of this God and Father who has done so much for us, I fear that some even of you who hear my words have once more thus grieved his heart and despised his love. In all this long time of Lent and Easter which, has just gone by you have missed the duty to which the most sacred and solemn of all the laws of the church has called you. But still our Lord has not yet treated you as you have treated him. He has not yet said to you, as the host said in the parable: "None of you that were invited shall taste of my supper." No; once more, in this great festival of Corpus Christi, he makes yet another appeal to you, to put aside your excuses, and to come to him with all your heart and soul. Do not, I beseech you, continue to insult and despise him who thus humbles himself before you, and still tries to remind you of his goodness and mercy. Come to him without delay, and make amends for your past neglect; all will be forgiven and forgotten. But remember, if tempted to reject him once more, and to postpone your return, that even his infinite mercy will at last have to yield to his justice; that his loving Spirit cannot strive with you for ever.