On July 6th the members of the Institute of Christ the King in Limerick were honored by a special visit from His Eminence, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura in Rome. His Eminence offered Pontifical High Mass in the Institute's Sacred Heart Church and blessed the newly installed pulpit and two angelic statues. Here is Cardinal Burke’s homily:
PONTIFICAL HIGH MASS
FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
SACRED HEART OF JESUS CHURCH
LIMERICK, IRELAND
JULY 6, 2014
Rom 8:18-23
Lk 5:1-11
Praised be Jesus Christ, now and for ever. Amen.
The texts for the Holy Mass today address the great struggle of our daily life in Christ. While, on the one hand, we enjoy the gift of the unceasing and immeasurable love of Christ flowing into our hearts from His glorious pierced Heart, on the other hand, we live in a world which suffers the effects of original sin, of the rebellion of our First Parents. We are heirs of the same effects of original sin and know within ourselves the struggle against so many temptations to turn away from Christ and to seek our happiness in ways and places in which it can never be found. Society, too, in so many respects rebels against God’s plan for the world and for us, claiming to provide security and peace, when, in fact, its program of forgetfulness of God and hostility to His laws results in ever great violence and destruction, even in the greatest violence of the attack upon innocent and defenseless human life, and the corruption of the integrity of marriage and the family, the cradle of human life and love.
Rightly we will pray in the Secret:
Receive our offerings, we beseech thee, O Lord, and be appeased thereby; and mercifully compel our rebel wills to yield unto thee.
It is, in fact, in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, in which the glorious Christ descends to our altars to make present His Sacrifice on Calvary, that know most fully and perfectly the truth about ourselves and our world, that we perceive the beauty of the law which God has written into all of creation and, above all, upon our human hearts. While Satan, the Father of Lies, seeks to destroy us, Christ will never abandon us in His holy Church. The Holy Spirit, poured forth into our hearts from His Most Sacred Heart, will purify us and strengthen us for the daily struggle of Christian living.
The Truth, Beauty, and Goodness – God the Son Incarnate – made present for us in the Eucharistic Sacrifice is the unfailing source of strength for our daily struggle to live in Christ amidst so many forces, both from within us and from outside of us, which would draw us away from Him and destroy us. The great mystery of our communion with Christ in the Most Blessed Sacrament does not lead us to be naïve about the situation of the world and about the suffering necessary to overcome evil, but it gives us assurance of the final victory of Christ in our daily struggles, little and big, and definitively at His Final Coming in glory.
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