FR. BRENDAN MCGUIRE

This last week, I visited the school classrooms, like I do once a trimester, and the rule is they can ask anything they want. It works out sometimes. Sometimes. This week, I was visiting one of the classes, and I get the regular questions. There are all sorts of fun questions, and then they asked some difficult ones. And then there was one that stopped me in my tracks.

And you were imitators of us and of the Lord, receiving the Word of God with great affection, with joy, and becoming a model to all believers.

These are words from Saint Paul to his beloved Thessalonians.
He uses this word, imitators. It is a beautiful word. In the Greek, it is mimetai, and mimetai is best translated as “model witness.”

A few weeks ago, I led a pilgrimage to Spain with about 40 of our parishioners. We had a wonderful opportunity to follow in the footsteps of Spanish mystics. We had the chance to visit Loyola, where Saint Ignatius was born and lived. But one of the most important parts of that was it is where he also returned to convalesce after being wounded in a war. It was there that he had his conversion.

I recently reread some statistics that I found rather shocking,
but probably not terribly surprising. They were from the Pew Research and CARA studies on church attendance and church affiliation. They said that 25% of people who claim to be Catholic, come to church. That means that 75% do not come to church. Now, they are the ones who claim to be Catholic.

As many of you know, I just returned last weekend from a two week pilgrimage to Spain with parishioners. We walked in the footsteps of St. Ignatius, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. John of the Cross. We started out following St. John of the Cross in Segovia and Sevilla, beautiful cities, stunning, where John was buried, Segovia.

My mother used to have problems with some of my homilies, and she used to say so, "You are a bit light on judgment and a bit heavy on love." I would say, "God has more love than judgment." She would go, "Yeah." Then she would always end the argument, "Yeah, but that one who gets in at the end of time, who kind of just shows up with a conversion at the last moment, I think that is just a bit unfair!"