Video and Text: Bp Slattery's response to Obama's "accomodation"

In the meanwhile, Bishop Edward Slattery of Tulsa, Oklahoma has released his own statement, and we may see other bishops doing the same.

Here is video; below is the text

My response to President Obama's HHS mandate "accommodation"
2/10/2012 - Bishop Edward J. Slattery
February 10, 2012
Saint Scholastica


Today, the President of the United States has issued what he referred to as an accommodation on the mandate from Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services issued on January 20 of this year. This mandate would have required - among other things - that religious institutions provide through their insurance policies hormonal contraception, abortifacients and direct sterilization, even though such a mandate violates our conscience and run counter to the 1st Amendment guarantee for the free exercise of Religion.


We are grateful that the President has begun to listen to the voices raised in opposition to this intrusion on our first amendment rights, and we are encouraged that he understands the urgency of this matter. However, we are dismayed that he does not understand the root issues which are involved here.

There will be a time, there must be a time, when Americans of good will and strong conscience discuss these points in a rational and non-idealogical conversation.

• First, no one is asking why it is that the Catholic Church is opposed to artificial birth control, direct sterilization and abortifacients. For two thousand years, the Church has understood that all of these methods that prevent life damage marriages and thereby weaken the fabric of society.

• Secondly, in describing artificial birth control, direct sterilization and abortifacients as “Preventive care” it is apparent that the ideology which underlies this governmental intrusion is that pregnancy is a disease and that the conception of life should be prevented.

• Thirdly, the question of who ultimately pays for this immoral coverage has remained unanswered by the President. Free coverage is never free; someone will have to pay for this coverage in their premium.

These three points will have to be addressed at some time, but what I want to address here is the constitutional issue. President Obama agreed that religious institutions would not compelled to directly pay for coverage which betrays their religious tenants or violates their conscience. This would include churches and those charitable institutions, schools and hospitals by which churches fulfill their mission.


However, the Constitution of the United States does not merely guarantee the freedom of religion to institutions, but to every American.


This includes every businessman or woman who willingly provides health insurance to his or her employees. It includes every single mother, every married couple, and every individual who does not wish to cooperate in this sin. No one should be required to betray their religious and moral beliefs or violate their conscience.


I want to encourage people not to be afraid of the sacrifices which are required to love one another with a genuine, faithful and life-giving love. Through these we are made holy and are formed more fully into what God wants us to be. Thank you.

The USCCB has issued a statement, which is, to my mind, a pass on making a more formal statement at this time. I'm perfectly fine with Dolan issuing his statement for the USCCB on Monday.  It will give him time to get buy-in on the language from other bishops.  I just hope he puts something out as good as what Bishop Slattery offered.

Before everyone gets upset thinking that +Dolan is giving in, you need to read very carefully.

February 10, 2012


New opportunity to dialogue with executive branch
Too soon to tell whether and how much improvement on core concerns
Commitment to religious liberty for all means legislation still necessary


WASHINGTON— The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) sees initial opportunities in preserving the principle of religious freedom after President Obama’s announcement today. But the Conference continues to express concerns. “While there may be an openness to respond to some of our concerns, we reserve judgment on the details until we have them,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, president of USCCB.


“The past three weeks have witnessed a remarkable unity of Americans from all religions or none at all worried about the erosion of religious freedom and governmental intrusion into issues of faith and morals,” he said.


“Today’s decision to revise how individuals obtain services that are morally objectionable to religious entities and people of faith is a first step in the right direction,” Cardinal-designate Dolan said. “We hope to work with the Administration to guarantee that Americans’ consciences and our religious freedom are not harmed by these regulations.”

First, I don't think it's all bad for a more formal statement to come out early next week. 

What I want to point out here is that the USCCB, in this, "we'll talk to you when we're ready" statement, Dolan talks about it being a "step in the right direction". Well, pay attention to the "it" he is talking about. I don't believe he is talking about the President's words, but the fact that Obama is recognizing something needs to change. Further up in the statement he says that the USCCB continues to express concerns. Stay tuned early next week for a more thorough response.

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Bishop Edward Slattery discusses the new translation of the Roman Missal



Click the pic to go to the November 2010 EOC issue to read in full


In the November issue of the Eastern Oklahoma Catholic (EOC), His Excellency, Bishop Edward J. Slattery of Tulsa discusses the new translation of the Roman Missal.   I requested permission to re-print the entire article here and received an affirmative response from Monsignor Patrick Brankin.

This is a continuation of a talk he gave at the opening of the school year at St. Thomas Aquinas in Santa Paula, California (see part 1 here, which I highly recommend reading, in the October issue of the EOC)

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In trying to articulate the sense of loss and dislocation that accompanied the abrupt liturgical break that took place in our liturgical celebrations in the ’60s, I am drawn to Josef Cardinal Ratzinger’s analysis of the situation. Cardinal Ratzinger, now His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, described the principle that legitimized this break in our liturgical tradition as a hermeneunic, or explanation, of discontinuity. Those who accept this – and their number is still legion – show an overriding dislike of anything that may have come down to us from past generations.


Accepted by liturgists and seminary professors – and unfortunately fostered by priests, pastors and bishops – this discontinuity required a complete severing of anything that was not modern or which might be incapable of being recreated in a modern idiom. This was so even should it require the Church to surrender Her ancient liturgical patrimony and much of Her theological vocabulary.


Thus sacred vessels and vestments were discarded with revolutionary fervor, replaced with new and often shoddy designs. Ancient gestures like genuflections and ritual prayers like the grace before and after meals became a source of derision and the occasion of mockery. Though these gestures and prayers had offered generations of Catholics a concrete way to express their faith, the hermeneutic of discontinuity demanded their removal and the marginalization of those who held to the ancient way of doing things. In one area of concern after another, the rich patrimony of the past was discarded – not because it was incapable of expressing or articulating the Church’s teaching, but simply because it was “not new.” It had to come tumbling down so that we could remake it, re-create it in a fresh, modern idiom.


Overnight, or so it seemed, the paradigm shifted. The Mass was no longer important because it offers man the fullness of redemption, but because it offered people a chance to be creative and assertive. Our participation no longer depended upon our worthy reception of the mysteries offered the communicant, but upon our ceaseless activity.


In the new liturgical paradigm, we are busy producing our salvation, working hard at all our ministries, when, in truth, no work is ever required of us. Christ has done it all, and we need only receive His gift. We know this to be true, but our actions reveal that, like Peter in the Upper Room, we really want to have the final say in how that salvation comes to us.


Today, I would like to suggest one simple change by which we might begin to recover the sense that the liturgy is something we receive, rather than something we create. I do not propose this as the most important or essential change toward this end, but merely as one change, one step, one movement away from the chaos of created liturgies toward the proper vision of the council.


What I would like to propose is that we recover the sung introit (the fragment of a psalm with its antiphon, or response, sung while the celebrant and ministers enter the church and approach the altar at Mass.) For two generations, Catholics have been expected to sing an opening hymn at Mass, and, in many parishes, the faithful are regularly browbeaten to “stand up and greet this morning’s celebrant with hymn ‘so-and-so’,” which, depending upon the parish, might be taken from the red hymn book or the blue hymn book or the nicely disposable paperback missalette.


So deeply has this “opening hymn mentality” shaped our consciousness that most Catholics would be astounded to hear me say that hymns have no real place in Mass.


Hymns belong in the Liturgy of the Hours and in the common devotions of the faithful, but the idea that the parish liturgy committee should sit down sometime early in the month and look through a hymn book, trying to find pretty hymns that haven’t been overdone in the past three or four months and that explore the themes of the Sunday Masses and that bring the people together as a singing community is an idea completely alien to the spirit of the Catholic liturgy.


The singing of hymns as Sunday worship was a Protestant innovation, better suited to their nonsacramental worship than to the Mass. And an opening hymn introduces – at the very inception of the sacred action – that element of creative busy-ness, which is, as we have seen, antithetical to the nature of salvation as a gift we receive from God.


Sung introits have been an integral part of the Latin Rite, and remain so in the Extraordinary Form, where the schola, or choir, chants the more difficult antiphon, and the congregation sings the psalm. This gives the faithful both the chance to listen and respond, practicing, in effect, the basic elements of the Mass: listening and responding.


Yet there are changes afoot and reason to hope. The introduction of the new translation of the Roman Missal, now definitely set for the First Sunday of Advent of next year, gives me reason to anticipate a new beginning. Faithful to the spirit of the Latin text and with an accurate translation into a consciously sacred style of English, the new Missal points to a rediscovered seriousness in the way America celebrates her liturgy and perhaps a greater appreciation, as well, of the elements of liturgy that have been discarded these past 40 years.


Perhaps with this new seriousness, and given the need to compose new chant melodies to accompany the new translations, this may well be the time when liturgists will begin discussing the meaning of a received liturgy; when composers might make their first attempts to set these antiphons to a simple English plain song and when publishers might begin to produce worthy and dignified liturgical books.


This new beginning is certainly a way of building up the Kingdom of God. I hope that we shall begin it well.

-Bishop Edward J. Slattery

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Bishop Edward Slattery on Conversion

Who can forget the unforgettable homily of Bishop Edward Slattery of Tulsa at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC.  Bishop Slattery stepped in at the 11th hour to take the place of Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos at a Pontifical High Mass which was three years in the planning. 

I have heard from people in the Tulsa area that Bishop Slattery's homily was pretty much on par with what they hear in that diocese on a regular basis.  Hence, I thought it might be worthwhile to mine the Diocese of Tulsa website now and then and see what His Excellency has to say. 

This is an excerpt from the May 2010 issue of the Eastern Oaklahoma Catholic (PDF):

When we realize that conversion, what the New Testament calls metanoia (that is a change of heart) then we begin to see that we are always being converted to the person of Jesus.

But this takes our whole life. That’s why we say ultimately that our conversion to Christ is a dynamic, lifelong process of allowing the Holy Spirit to form us into the image of Jesus.

Seen from this perspective, the “converts” who entered the Church at Easter are still on their road of conversion. What began in their Inquiry Classes or the Pre-Catechumenate stage of the RCIA, or perhaps even in those activities, events and situations which formed them as disciples of Christ from their earliest days, does not end with their reception of the sacraments. Rather, it enters into a new and more fruitful stage. How strange this sounds to those of us who so often think of conversion in terms of endpoints!

But, at the same time, what an enormous and wonderful challenge it places before us, since this understanding of conversion as a lifelong process demands of us a continuing struggle to identify ourselves with the personal style of Jesus Christ, Whose humility will lead us to simplicity, to poverty, to responsibility for others, and, above all, to a self-surrender worked out in love and expressed in the very real circumstances of our daily lives. If what we believe does not flow into how we live our lives, then we are Christians by name only, Catholics by claim only. And this cannot be.

Real conversion requires us to live a life in which there can be no differentiation between what we believe and what we do; no gap between the world of faith and the daily world of commerce or business, academics or medicine. We bear witness to the Lord, Whose disciples we are (and Whose disciples we still seek to become), not on Sunday alone, when we attend Church and receive the Eucharist, but on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday night at soccer practice and Thursday when we take the kids to gymnastics and Friday when we treat the family to a movie.

And, as a further consideration, let me say, too, that a husband must live out this conversion to Christ by becoming more converted every day to his wife.

He must always seek to revise his actions toward her and the family in the light of Christ’s call to “love one another as I have loved you.” Of course, the wife, too, must be converted every day to her husband, so that aided bythe Spirit of Jesus and with a heart made true by frequent recourse to the Sacraments of Confession and Communion, she can truly become the living tabernacle of the domestic Church, which worships God in her home, the resting place of deep peace where her children can find the presence of Christ, and, in that presence, hear Him calling their names.

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Go thank Bishop Slattery...

Many are of the opinion that Bishop Slattery's homily from this past Saturday will go down as one of the best in American history.  If you have read it, or heard the audio, take the time to go tell him what you think.

You might consider sending a copy to your favorite Catholic news outlets.  As of today, this thing is still pretty much contained within  the Catholic blogosphere.

Read and comment at the Diocese of Tulsa

Listen to the audio at the blog of Father Z

Please consider sending the Diocese of Tulsa link to Zenit's news contact form.  Just right click the first link above and "copy shortcut" and then follow the link to Zenit.  Ask them nicely to share it with readers. If they can't see my lonely email, perhaps they will see it if many send it in.

ZENIT has covered it! http://zenit.org/article-29071?l=english


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The obedient are not held captive by Holy Mother Church; it is the disobedient who are held captive by the world!

Full Text of Bishop Edward Slattery's Sermon at the National Shrine on April 24, 2010

EDIT: The text is now on the Diocese of Tulsa website.  There is a comment box there.  Consider telling Bishop Slattery how his homily moved you, and while you are there think about leaving a spiritual bouquet of Mass and prayer intentions.  Go read: Bishop Slattery's Homily at Solemn High Mass at National Shrine. You can catch audio if you prefer at the blog of Fr. Z, but please leave your comments at the diocesan post.

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Thanks to Msgr. Patrick Brankin, Secretary to His Excellency, Bishop Edward J. Slattery of the Diocese of Tulsa, Oklahoma, I am very grateful to be able to bring to you the full text of  the sermon given on April 24, 2010 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC.  The Mass was a Pontifical High Mass in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite.  The Mass was in the planning for three years to honor Pope Benedict XVI on the fifth anniversary of his pontificate. 

Bishop Slattery filled the vacancy just a matter of days before the event when Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos backed out.  This, on top of being stranded in Rome because of the volcanic ash in the air and grounding of airlines.

He communicates some hard truths about following Christ fully, and he does so in a way that is fatherly. It is not condescending or alarming, but warm and inviting to reflection.  I found myself strengthened and hope-filled. Please avoid the temptation of thinking that the bishop was targeting his sermon at any particular group of people, lest you miss the opportunity to learn what God is communicating to you through these words. There is something here for everybody, whether you are are victim of clerical abuse, or find yourself in a kind of despair over these things; for those who suffer from a debilitating disease, and those who are weary.  For all of us, a lesson in what it means to suffer in Christ, and to imitate His obedience.

Pray for our bishops and priests, that they continue to teach us these things.

Below is the full text of Bishop Slattery's moving homily, with some additional background at the bottom of this post.  Bloggers, news orgs - lets get this out there.  If you want to send the bishop your thoughts, or a Mass card, here is contact info. 

EDIT @4:10: Fr. Z has audio of the sermon

EDIT @6:57  Pics can be found at A Priest Life blog

April 26

EDIT @ 5:30: Last two paragraphs swapped out text provided for transcript of audio.

Msgr. Charles Pope of Washington DC explains: Why celebrate Mass in Latin?

I've also added in some interesting comments found elsewhere, about the homily (see bottom).

Gospel reading was Mt 16:13-19

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Solemn Pontifical Mass

Basilica of the Immaculate Conception

Washington, D.C.

Celebrating the fifth anniversary

of the ascension of Benedict XVI to the throne of Peter

- ad multos annos! -

We have much to discuss - you and I …


… much to speak of on this glorious occasion when we gather together in the glare of the world’s scrutiny to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the ascension of Joseph Ratzinger to the throne of Peter.


We must come to understand how it is that suffering can reveal the mercy of God and make manifest among us the consoling presence of Jesus Christ, crucified and now risen from the dead.


We must speak of this mystery today, first of all because it is one of the great mysteries of revelation, spoken of in the New Testament and attested to by every saint in the Church’s long history, by the martyrs with their blood, by the confessors with their constancy, by the virgins with their purity and by the lay faithful of Christ’s body by their resolute courage under fire.

But we must also speak clearly of this mystery because of the enormous suffering which is all around us and which does so much to determine the culture of our modern age.

From the enormous suffering of His Holiness these past months to the suffering of the Church’s most recent martyrs in India and Africa, welling up from the suffering of the poor and the dispossessed and the undocumented, and gathering tears from the victims of abuse and neglect, from women who have been deceived into believing that abortion was a simple medical procedure and thus have lost part of their soul to the greed of the abortionist, and now flowing with the heartache of those who suffer from cancer, diabetes, AIDS, or the emotional diseases of our age, it is the sufferings of our people that defines the culture of our modern secular age.

This enormous suffering which can take on so many varied physical, mental, and emotional forms will reduce us to fear and trembling - if we do not remember that Christ - our Pasch - has been raised from the dead. Our pain and anguish could dehumanize us, for it has the power to close us in upon ourselves such that we would live always in chaos and confusion - if we do not remember that Christ - our hope - has been raised for our sakes. Jesus is our Pasch, our hope and our light.


He makes himself most present in the suffering of his people and this is the mystery of which we must speak today, for when we speak of His saving presence and proclaim His infinite love in the midst of our suffering, when we seek His light and refuse to surrender to the darkness, we receive that light which is the life of men; that light which, as Saint John reminds us in the prologue to his Gospel, can never be overcome by the darkness, no matter how thick, no matter how choking.


Our suffering is thus transformed by His presence. It no longer has the power to alienate or isolate us. Neither can it dehumanize us nor destroy us. Suffering, however long and terrible it may be, has only the power to reveal Christ among us, and He is the mercy and the forgiveness of God.


The mystery then, of which we speak, is the light that shines in the darkness, Christ Our Lord, Who reveals Himself most wondrously to those who suffer so that suffering and death can do nothing more than bring us to the mercy of the Father.


But the point which we must clarify is that Christ reveals Himself to those who suffer in Christ, to those who humbly accept their pain as a personal sharing in His Passion and who are thus obedient to Christ’s command that we take up our cross and follow Him. Suffering by itself is simply the promise that death will claim these mortal bodies of ours, but suffering in Christ is the promise that we will be raised with Christ, when our mortality will be remade in his immortality and all that in our lives which is broken because it is perishable and finite will be made imperishable and incorrupt.


This is the meaning of Peter’s claim that he is a witness to the sufferings of Christ and thus one who has a share in the glory yet to be revealed. Once Peter grasped the overwhelming truth of this mystery, his life was changed. The world held nothing for Peter. For him, there was only Christ.


This is, as you know, quite a dramatic shift for the man who three times denied Our Lord, the man to whom Jesus said, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”


Christ’s declaration to Peter that he would be the rock, the impregnable foundation, the mountain of Zion upon which the new Jerusalem would be constructed, follows in Matthew’s Gospel Saint Peter’s dramatic profession of faith, when the Lord asks the Twelve, “Who do people say that I am?” and Peter, impulsive as always, responds “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.”

Only later - much later - would Peter come to understand the full implication of this first Profession of Faith. Peter would still have to learn that to follow Christ, to truly be His disciple, one must let go of everything which the world considers valuable and necessary, and become powerless. This is the mystery which confounds independent Peter. It is the mystery which still confounds us: to follow Christ, one must surrender everything and become obedient with the obedience of Christ, for no one gains access to the Kingdom of the Father, unless he enter through the humility and the obedience of Jesus.

Peter had no idea that eventually he would find himself fully accepting this obedience, joyfully accepting his share in the Passion and Death of Christ. But Peter loved Our Lord and love was the way by which Peter learned how to obey. “Lord, you know that I love thee,” Peter affirms three times with tears; and three times Christ commands him to tend to the flock that gathers at the foot of Calvary - and that is where we are now.


Peter knew that Jesus was the true Shepherd, the one Master and the only teacher; the rest of us are learners and the lesson we must learn is obedience, obedience unto death. Nothing less than this, for only when we are willing to be obedient with the very obedience of Christ will we come to recognize Christ’s presence among us.


Obedience is thus the heart of the life of the disciple and the key to suffering in Christ and with Christ. This obedience, is must be said, is quite different from obedience the way it is spoken of and dismissed in the world.


For those in the world, obedience is a burden and an imposition. It is the way by which the powerful force the powerless to do obeisance. Simply juridical and always external, obedience is the bending that breaks, but a breaking which is still less painful than the punishment meted out for disobedience. Thus for those in the world obedience is a punishment which must be avoided; but for Christians, obedience is always personal, because it is centered on Christ. It is a surrender to Jesus Whom we love.


For those whose lives are centered in Christ, obedience is that movement which the heart makes when it leaps in joy having once discovered the truth.


Let us consider, then, that Christ has given us both the image of his obedience and the action by which we are made obedient.


The image of Christ’s obedience is His Sacred Heart. That Heart, exposed and wounded must give us pause, for man’s heart it generally hidden and secret. In the silence of his own heart, each of us discovers the truth of who we are, the truth of why we are silent when we should speak, or bothersome and quarrelsome when we should be silent. In our hidden recesses of the heart, we come to know the impulses behind our deeds and the reasons why we act so often as cowards and fools.


But while man’s heart is generally silent and secret, the Heart of the God-Man is fully visible and accessible. It too reveals the motives behind our Lord’s self-surrender. It was obedience to the Father’s will that mankind be reconciled and our many sins forgiven us. “Son though he was,” the Apostle reminds us, “Jesus learned obedience through what He suffered.” Obedient unto death, death on a cross, Jesus asks his Father to forgive us that God might reveal the full depth of his mercy and love. “Father, forgive them,” he prayed, “for they know not what they do.”


Christ’s Sacred Heart is the image of the obedience which Christ showed by his sacrificial love on Calvary. The Sacrifice of Calvary is also for us the means by which we are made obedient and this is a point which you must never forget: at Mass, we offer ourselves to the Father in union with Christ, who offers Himself in perfect obedience to the Father. We make this offering in obedience to Christ who commanded us to “Do this in memory of me” and our obediential offering is perfected in the love with which the Father receives the gift of His Son.


Do not be surprised then that here at Mass, our bloodless offering of the bloody sacrifice of Calvary is a triple act of obedience. First, Christ is obedient to the Father, and offers Himself as a sacrifice of reconciliation. Secondly, we are obedient to Christ and offer ourselves to the Father with Jesus the Son; and thirdly, in sharing Christ’s obedience to the Father, we are made obedient to a new order of reality, in which love is supreme and life reigns eternal, in which suffering and death have been defeated by becoming for us the means by which Christ’s final victory, his future coming, is made manifest and real today.


Suffering then, yours, mine, the Pontiffs, is at the heart of personal holiness, because it is our sharing in the obedience of Jesus which reveals his glory. It is the means by which we are made witnesses of his suffering and sharers in the glory to come.


Do not be dismayed that there are many in the Church who have not yet grasped this point, and fewer yet still in the world will even dare to consider it. But you - you know this to be true - and it is enough. For ten men who whisper the truth speak louder than a hundred million who lie.


If, then, someone asks of what we spoke today, tell them we spoke only of the truth. If someone asks why it is you came here to Mass, say that it was so that you could be obedient with Christ. If someone asks about the homily, tell them it was about a mystery. And if someone asks what I said to the present situation, tell them only that we must - all of us - become saints through what we suffer.

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Noteworthy Background on Bishop Slattery

You may be interested in some background on His Excellency.  I am told that his first response to the sex-abuse scandal was to order a Holy Hour of Reparation in front of the Blessed Sacrament, at the same time in all parishes and Catholic institutions within the diocese.  The people of Tulsa, led by their bishop, went to their knees together.  One might ask, why should those who have not abused children do time on their knees for those who did? The answer is simple:  Imitation of Christ who suffered immensely not for sins He committed, but for our sins.  Further, we bear some responsibility if we have not prayed for our priests and bishops.  Many Catholics today  are unfamiliar with the term reparation, but it is beginning to get taught at various levels.

I am also told that Bishop Slattery also created a confraternity for those who suffer in various ways, from cancer and diabetes, and other long-term illnesses that directs their suffering for the purpose of healing in those who have been abused by the Church's sacred ministers.  This is a form of redemptive suffering (col. 1:24).

These things were initiated some eight years ago, and continue today. 

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Here are a few comments I picked up from the blog of Father Z, who always has a good many comments to read through:

trespinos said:
Could even one of those attending yesterday have entered the Basilica Shrine expecting that he or she would be witness to something even rarer than a XXIst Century Pontifical Solemn High Mass, namely a sermon so profound and Spirit-filled that, published, it will claim a rank among the finest ever delivered by a North American churchman?

Dan said:
I was there yesterday, and when Bishop Slattery finished his sermon I was blown away…amazing. Honestly, I had been a bit upset by all the allegations of abuse/cover up in the news recently…Bishop Slattery’s sermon made me proud to be Catholic and to follow our Holy Father and unite our sufferings to his so that we can one day be saints- through what we suffer.


Probably the best sermon I have ever heard. It was so appropiate to follow it with the Credo…I sang it with such confidence in my faith after hearing what His Excellency had to say.

catholicmidwest said:

That’s probably the best homily I’ve ever seen/heard. Just beautiful.


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The obedient are not held captive by Holy Mother Church; it is the disobedient who are held captive by the world!