Homily: Celebrating the Forgotten Saints

[00:00:00] I confess, usually every year on Halloween, I think about when I was growing up and would go trick-or-treating around our neighborhood and stuff. And those of you who are about my age, you may remember in those days, you would go to the grocery store and get this like cheap plastic mask that was held together by one little strand.

[00:00:22] And there's one little slit for you to breathe out of. And these two little bitty things that your eyes to see, meanwhile you're walking around the dark. And I remember walking around with my dad saying, Dad, I can't breathe in this thing. And he's like, Oh, oxygen is overrated. You don't need it. You're fine. You're fine.

[00:00:44] But you know, the sweaty thing. So, you know, usually in many of our neighborhoods we have this, the different neighbors that instead of coming to the door again and again, they just put out that big bowl of candy on that guy. Kind of the old curmudgeon. But you have one kid that comes in and dumps the whole thing in his bag. That was me, by the way. I was the one stealing the candy.

[00:01:13] But probably most of us have those neighbors, don't we, that really kind of go over the top with the Halloween decorations. And about 10 minutes after Halloween, the Christmas decorations go up. And if you're like me, when you go and you go out to get your mail or you go for a walk or you get into your car, you see your neighbors, right? Like, Hey, how's it going? How you doing? How you doing? How's it going? How's it going?

[00:01:40] You have no idea what their names are. Like, Hey, how's it going? And you may think if you know the neighborhood well, they're kind of going through this. That one's going through that. That one's going through that. They're about to move.

[00:01:55] But we don't really know them. Same thing maybe we could say when we come to mass, right? I mean, most of us sit in the same spot, including me. Okay. But many of us, we don't know what's going on with the person next to us.

[00:02:12] The person in front of us, the person sitting behind us. We may know their face, but we don't know what they're really struggling with. And then, of course, we'll leave here. We'll go to Kroger to pick up some things going home. And we see him and we sit next to him every week. We're like, Hey, you. Right? We don't really know what's going on with them. Point being, look, we all have things that are weighing heavy on our hearts.

[00:02:43] All of us. And we have someone, most of us, that we're worried about. And one of the things that we learn from the saints is we learn a very simple thing. If you don't remember anything I'm saying this morning, please remember this. Grace makes possible what seems impossible. Grace makes possible the situations that appear absolutely impossible.

[00:03:11] In other words, we're going to get through it. We're going to get through it. I promise we're going to get through it. Okay? Some way or another, it may be a little ugly at times, but we're going to get through it. That's what we learn from these saints. Did you know in the Catholic world, there's over 10,000 canonized saints? 10,000. Most of whom are women. I was telling this to a woman I know, and she was like, Yeah, of course, duh. Ah. Right?

[00:03:42] It's really interesting. Over 10,000, 100% of the people in heaven are saints, but less than 1% of the people in heaven are canonized. So what does that mean? It means some of the people in heaven that are saints are your relatives, your parents, your grandparents. Did you know that one day people will be praying to you for help? What?

[00:04:13] If you want to get to heaven, you've got to become a saint. And when you get to heaven, you will be a saint, which means one day people here at St. Mike's may well be praying to you for help. Wow. Lord help us, right? I don't know. I mean. Right? But this is how God set it up. We call the church triumphant in heaven, the church here on earth militant. That we're helping each other, yeah.

[00:04:38] Pope Francis canonized more saints than any other pope in the history of the church, followed by John Paul II. But one of the things that we learn from the lives of the saints, these men and women that have gone before us, is that we're going to get through this. We are going to get through it one way or another. Grace makes possible what seems impossible. The saints give us the long view of history.

[00:05:07] What does that mean, Father? It means this. Put another way. Probably most of us here at some point want to retire, including yours truly. All right? We want to retire. But what comes after your retirement, your post-retirement, i.e., when you leave this world? Because our retirement time is pretty brief. So what we're celebrating today comes after your retirement in this world.

[00:05:37] Call it your eternal retirement. That's what we're celebrating today. Okay? Okay? This is what all these 10,000 people point us to. Your eternal retirement. To that point. You know, there's all these saints that every Catholic and non-Catholic have heard of. St. Francis of Assisi. St. The Little Flower. We have our statue over here.

[00:06:03] St. Anthony, who we pray to when we've lost our keys again. He's like, Lord, come on. You're killing me. Right? Poor St. Anthony. But what about all those saints that nobody prays to? Anybody ever heard of St. Eusebius? I'm the only Catholic that's ever heard of St. Eusebius. The patron saint of church historians. Love that guy.

[00:06:29] Allow me to give to you and to share with you five saints that most Catholics have never heard of. Number one, St. Josephine Bakita died in 1947. And she grew up in Sudan in Africa. She had three brothers, three sisters. And when she was only seven years old, she was kidnapped and sold into slavery.

[00:06:56] She walked, I'm not exaggerating, several hundred miles as a seven-year-old girl to the ship that took her away from her family. She's one of the patron saints of those that are the victims of human trafficking. Over 25 million women and children around the world. So she was sold over the course of her lifetime. She was sold into slavery to four different slave owners.

[00:07:23] When she was 14 years old, she could count 114 scars on her body where she had been whipped. And she prayed later. She became a Catholic, became a Catholic nun, a Kenosha nun. She prayed 114 Our Fathers every day for the man who put those marks on her body. What do we learn from St. Josephine Bakita?

[00:07:53] Forgiveness. Can you imagine? I mean, it would have been so easy for her to get a rabbit hole of bitterness. Who would blame her? I wouldn't. And then the same day that she was canonized in the year 2000, there was an American woman who was canonized. Her name was St. Catherine Drexel. Anybody heard of her? Catherine Drexel. Man, what a rock star, this woman. Incredible. She died in 1955.

[00:08:22] Her dad was about, he was kind of the Elon Musk of his day. She inherited, when her dad died, she inherited in modern day currency, would come out to about $600 million. That's a lot of money now. That was a heck of a lot of money back then. So here's this young woman who inherited $600 million. You know how much she had when she died? They said she was, quote, virtually penniless.

[00:08:51] She's none. What's she going to do with $600 million? You know what she did? Started 60 schools, 50 orphanages, and single-handedly wrote the checks to start Xavier University in Louisiana for African Americans to get a college education. What do we learn from her? Put simply, detachment. Look, you can't take it with you.

[00:09:22] As Job says in the Old Testament, naked I came into this world, naked I'm going to go out. Got to give it back. Then, of course, one of my favorite saints who was only 14 years old when he died, St. Jose Sanchez del Rio from Jalisco. You know, pretty much everyone in the world has heard of Hitler or Stalin.

[00:09:48] But almost few have heard of or heard the name President Plutarco Callez. He was the president in Mexico during what's called the Cristero War of 1927 to 1929. He killed thousands and thousands and thousands of Catholics. In fact, he used to hang them from the poles on the trains so that when people would pull back the blinds on the trains, they'd see dead bodies.

[00:10:19] That's what he did, a pleasant human being. He arrested a 14-year-old young man. And you know what his crime was? He was praying in church. That was his crime. He was praying. So they arrested Jose, and they bring him in, and they were about to torture him. And they said, look, look, this is not that big a deal. This is no big deal.

[00:10:47] Look, all you have to do is renounce your Catholic faith, renounce Jesus Christ, and you can walk out of here. And you know what he said? He looked at him and said, nope. Now, what I'm about to share with you is pretty gruesome, but I feel like we need to know. They pinned him down, and they sliced off the bottom of his feet. Sliced off the bottom half of both feet.

[00:11:16] And they made him walk around the entire town until he died. As you can imagine, there's a long trail of blood going around the entire town. If you go to that town today, and I've been there, that trail is now the stations of the cross. He shed his blood just like Jesus. He's 14 years old. St. José Sánchez del Río. What do we learn from him?

[00:11:46] Courage. I mean, it's worth asking, could you do that? Could I? Blessed Carl Leisner. Blessed Carl Leisner. He was a German seminarian in Dachau concentration camp. He died only one month before the Allies liberated Dachau. That's where all the priests were, by the way. And he was a seminarian.

[00:12:16] He wanted to be a priest. But you have to have a bishop to ordain you to be a priest. And as luck would have it, he got tuberculosis. And he thought, I'm never going to be ordained a priest. But somebody came up to him and said, hey, there's a bishop here. And they can't. And he said he would ordain you. He said, great. So in the middle of the night, for fear of death, because they would have killed him instantly, he was ordained a priest, Carl Leisner.

[00:12:45] Now, here's a question of those of us here who are Catholic. Does anybody know what this is called? This is not priest pajamas, by the way. Anybody know what they call this? A chasuble. It's called a chasuble. Okay? So what the Jewish prisoners did in Dachau, the Jewish prisoners, is they each cut little chunks of their prison uniforms. And they got hundreds of them. And they sewed them together.

[00:13:14] And they made Carl Leisner a chasuble for his first mass. The Jews. He celebrated one mass and died the next day. Carl Leisner. What did we learn from him? Perseverance. That's what we learned from him.

[00:13:37] When all seems lost, you and I as Catholic Christians look desperation in the eye and say, let's do it. You're not going to take my spirit. And finally, the last person I want to tell you about is my favorite. Blessed Margaret of Castillo. Love this woman. Love her. She lived in the 14th century.

[00:14:04] And she was born into a very royal family of nobles just north of Rome. And her family, her parents wanted a little princess. A little princess. You know what they got? A woman who was hunchback, twisted face, was blind, deformed, and was all of four feet tall. Now, I'm five foot four. So this, she was probably about as tall as this, maybe.

[00:14:34] Maybe a little shorter. Margaret of Castillo. They were so ashamed by her that her own parents built a small room on the far end of their property took Margaret, dropped her there, and left her by herself for the first 16 years of her life. Can you imagine spending the first 16 years of your life completely alone? Would you be a little bitter?

[00:15:06] After 16 years, her parents took her, dropped her off at the local church, and said, look, we don't want her. Take her. They built a little room next to the church. She was able to pray, became a saint. In fact, she was so holy, even the pope at the time wrote her letters seeking her advice and prayers. Blessed Margaret of Castillo. Her body, even though she died in the 14th century, still has not corrupted.

[00:15:37] They call her the little one, four feet tall. What do we learn from someone like that? I'll tell you what we learned from someone like Margaret of Castillo. We learned this. We have to let go of resentment. Resentment is corrosive. It's really true. I mean, can you imagine? Who would not be bitter towards their parents for doing this? And she's like, let it go.

[00:16:07] Let it go. We have to make that choice. Because for many people, the addiction is resentment. It's an addiction. I define my whole life by who I don't like and what they did to me. All right, you can do that. Good luck. With her, we see, let it go. Brothers and sisters, my point with all of this is very simple. Grace makes possible what seems totally impossible.

[00:16:36] It would be impossible for a 14-year-old young boy to have that kind of courage were it not for grace. But he did it. And frankly, so can we.