Window to Truth

By Larry and Mary Sue Eck

Note: This article originally appeared in the Winter 1996-97 issue of Medjugorge Magazine. It has been reprinted here with permission of the authors. For more information about Medjugorge Magazine, please visit http://www.medjugormag.com

From first grade on, he wanted to be a priest. “When I was in the first grade in St. Raymond’s Catholic School of East Rockaway, Long Island, Sister Pauline of the Immaculate Heart of Mary read us stories of saints every week,” Father Pablo Straub told us as the interview began.

“Even at this young age of six, I began to say, ‘When I grow up I’m going to be one of them saints!’ The thinking pattern began to grow in my mind that to become a man-saint you didn’t get married, you said Mass. I remember being at Mass and telling myself, ‘Learn it all. Learn it word for word because some day you’ll be telling it to the people.’”

Father Straub said he made a strong effort to do just that “because I just knew I was going to be a priest. I never even asked myself if I wanted to be a priest, and I never changed the question to ‘Would I rather be a fireman?’ Rather I’d wonder, ‘Do they allow priests to put out fires?’”

Father Straub also admitted that in sixth grade when everyone wanted to be a baseball player, his only question was whether a priest could play for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The dreams of this little boy always involved the priesthood. “I could just picture myself paddling canoes on rivers in jungles and going to where the people most needed a priest,” he said.  It is no wonder then that this young man went from eighth grade right into the Redemptorist minor seminary. “I chose the Redemptorists because a boy in my home town had a brother who was one.” In the seminary he had a burning desire to learn everything well. “I was afraid of not doing what I was supposed to. For instance, if I was to do a history lesson, I’d tell myself, ‘If I don’t do this right, some day when I’m a priest and I’m supposed to know this, I won’t.’ It was like a passion with me. I had a very lively conscience. I even played baseball with all my heart and soul.”

Father Pablo Straub was ordained in 1958 and after two more years of theology, was sent to Puerto Rico where he remained for 19 years. He spent five years on top of the Andes mountains among the Incas; six months on the streets of Manila; and the last 12 years in Mexico.

“Spanish is my second language,” he said. “I learned it in the seminary where I had Puerto Rican classmates. I wanted to be a part of the people so from the time I was ordained, through all 28 years of active priesthood, I have spoken in Spanish.”

In fact, Father has spoken Spanish for so many years that Americans can detect a Spanish accent today when he speaks his native English. (It is also true that one can detect a New York accent at times as well.)

FOUNDS NEW ORDERS: LOS CONSAGRADOS

Father Straub is still a Redemptorist but had permission from his order to found a new order. We asked him how this came about.

“A very energetic movement of lay people in Puerto Rico in the ‘70s and ‘80s came together to pray and adore Jesus in the Eucharist, to be with our Blessed Mother and to plan evangelization among the poor,” he replied. “We had communities of young men evangelizing young men, communities of young women evangelizing young women, communities of couples evangelizing couples. From the impulses of these communities of lay people was born an order of women and later an order of men.

“Those communities were so good that vocations were born. A few young men and quite a number of young women began seeking religious life. I took them to religious orders where their desires would be satisfied. Then, in the 1980s, a couple of young women told me they wanted to be religious. ‘Okay, I’ll take you to such and such an order.’ But they said, ‘No, we want to evangelize in a different way; we think we should be in a new order.’

“I told them, ‘I think you’re off the wall.’

“It took me almost four years to find out they were right. Then I committed myself to the founding of these two new orders. It didn’t come from a desk plan. It came from the laity. Once I decided they were right, I didn’t have to look very far for a rule for their order. The rule of St. Alphonsus, composed in the late1740s, fell into my lap and from that the rule came.”

Father continued: “Why begin a new order? Aren’t there many orders already? Yes, there are, great orders that have and are doing great work. But, numerically, some of them are just not able to scratch the surface.

“God the Holy Spirit is raising up new orders to carry on the work of these ancient orders among people who would have had no contact with the Church unless there were new impulses, born of the Holy Spirit. These impulses have been born from a demand for a new evangelization, not new in deed but in contact. The faith itself never changes but can become new in the sense of new energy and modes of presentation. A much broader evangelization can reach many more millions of peoples and make use of the modern mass media communications, as the Holy Father has encouraged us. There are going to be new orders born of these needs.

“It’s not like someone sits down at his desk and says, ‘I think I’ll start a new order.’ Rather, in shanty towns and in poor mountain sides, amidst tears and suffering, new orders are born for the glory of God.

“Here, in Mexico, we have founded two religious orders that are both contemplative and missionary. There is an order of young women who are called Las Consagradas del Santisimo Salvador. In English, the Consecrates of the Most Holy Savior. There is also an order of men, Los Consagrados del Santisimo Salvador. All the young men are studying for the priesthood. By contemplative we mean that we live together in a monastic life, or in the case of the Sisters, a conventual life.

“There is a great deal of prayer and contemplation. We are out of bed at 5:25 a.m. to begin a Holy Hour before Jesus in the most Blessed Sacrament. While we are at home, we keep silence all the time except for about an hour and a half for prayer and study. We go out on the missions six months of the year. We beg God that He lets us contemplate Him and then give us the gift of the people, the fruit of our contemplation.

“When we go out on missions, we go as people who are intimate with God, people who can truly tell others about God and how he loves them because we have become so aware of how much God loves us. We are about total self-giving to Jesus and Mary, as St. Alphonsus Liguori, the founder of the Redemptorists taught us. His is a rule of total self-giving to Jesus and Mary and of being out among the most abandoned, preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ.

“In the post-Christian society we live in, many, many millions of people in all countries are completely unreached by the gospel of Jesus Christ. This has happened in two ways: either a given country has had almost no preaching of the Gospel or the country has received the Gospel but it has fallen into a culture of death, where life has no meaning.”

Of course, we immediately thought of our own country as Father Straub mentioned a “culture of death,” the same words of Pope John Paul II, which so aptly describe the spiritual condition of the United States.

Father talked of countries who have even been Catholic at one time but no longer have people who know, as the Catechism taught: “God made me to know him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this life and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven.”

Father Straub continued, his face grim. “To understand where the people receive the ideas they have concerning life, you need to consider whether it is from the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which the Pope said is the Gospel of Life, or whether it is from the pagan society around them. For example, where do the people receive their ideas about marriage? Do they know the concept that it is a total self-giving Sacrament? Who is giving people their concepts of what sexual intimacy is all about, the Church or the world?

“Are people imbibing the idea that sex is a precious gift from God for the sake of love between a man and a woman and to bring new life? Or are they imbibing the idea that sex is recreational for the sake of doing their own thing? It’s obvious we are losing people by the millions. There are countries where Catholic Mass attendance has dropped from 85 percent to 10 percent in a period of only three decades. Thank God for countries such as Mexico where Mass attendance is rising.”

We have no doubt that Father’s new religious orders are contributing to that increase in Mexico. We asked him if starting these orders was the greatest blessing of his priesthood. He replied: “Daily Mass is the greatest blessing of my priesthood. Even in Heaven nothing is greater than the Mass. It is a marvelous personal blessing to be the spiritual father of these men and women who want to truly follow Jesus Christ and imitate Him in his life, in His virtues, in His redemptive self-immolation. To be the spiritual father of such good young men and women, not that I deserve it or do it well, is an unspeakable joy.”

MEDJUGORGE

Another joy in Father Pablo’s life is Medjugorge. “I was in Latin America and didn’t hear about it until about 1986. Then I read about it often and thought about it but never had a desire to go there until January of 1994. One day this tremendous desire to go there just came into me. In May 1994, I was at a Peace Conference in St. Louis, and an unknown lady said to me, ‘Father Pablo, would you go to Medjugorge with us?’ I thought for a second and a half and replied, ‘Yes.’”

“It took until Easter Week of 1995 to arrange the visit,” Father said. “Things happen when Our Lady decides. There were about 50 people in the group and we stayed in the home of Mirijana. Her second child was just a baby then.

“What happened in Medjugorge was Our Lady saying to me, ‘Be detached. Detach yourself from everything that is not my Son and Me. Have nothing that you cannot offer to me. There is to be no affection or love that is not offerable to My Son and to me. Be detached from everything. It’s not enough to do good things; you must do good things with perfect detachment from yourself and from your own will.’

“I said this to two or three people and they would ask me, ‘What is there left for you to be detached from?’ And I would say, ‘God will let me know what He wants me to be detached from.’”

Father continued: “Isn’t this kind of remarkable? Some people go to Medjugorge and see a marvelous happening in the sun. This has happened to me but not in Medjugorge. Some people will experience wonderful cures. The only thing that came to me was ‘Detach yourself totally.’

“It didn’t take too long for Our Lady to implement this. She began seeing to it, much to my pain, that I be detached from things and from people. I noticed that the evangelization we’d been doing for so many years became stronger. I believe Our Lady herself made us meet people she had chosen so the evangelization would go further and further out into the world.

“After I went to Medjugorge, so many marvelous things began to happen. For instance, Catholic television programs in Mexico that could not have been dreamed of as little as four years ago have begun to flourish. I think Our Lady has asked us to take part in it.

“And the two new orders have been purified and strengthened and made to grow numerically too. The men’s order has gone from five members to 11 members and the Sisters’ order has gone from 11 to 15.”

We asked Father if he has experienced any failures during the years of his priesthood and received a surprising answer.

“I examine my conscience twice a day and beg God’s mercy many times a day but I can’t point to any one failure,” he said. “I see every single day that I don’t do everything and become everything that God has the right to expect of me, but I know his Mercy flows all over me.

“The Church Herself, in a certain sense, has not a single wrinkle nor spot because the Church is divine, is married to Jesus Christ, her Spouse, who is God. The Church partakes of His divinity in a certain sense, and yet the Church is also you and me. If we want to know who the sinners are, all we have to do is look in the mirror.

“In this Church which is human and therefore sinful, bad things happen which shouldn’t, and good things don’t happen which should.

“All of us have suffered in the Church but we must never become embittered. We must love the Church more than ever, though we suffer because She is the spouse of Jesus Christ, flesh of His flesh and blood of His blood. The two have become one flesh and are inseparable. We must love the Church and know that the Church is going to become stronger than ever.”

LIFE ON MISSION IN MEXICO

Father Pablo said he tries to be home with his religious orders at least half of the year.

“Ideally, it’s three months home and three months out on mission. When we’re out, we go into a town and give a general mission for the whole town. In Latin America, 90 percent of the town goes to a mission. We sometimes are in places where there hasn’t been a Mass in ten years. In one place there hadn’t been Mass but twice in my lifetime.

“That’s not the general picture though; usually we go to places that have Mass sporadically, maybe two or three times a year because of the shortage of priests. In the mission to the whole of the town, we give the great truths of the faith: the Trinity, the Incarnation of the Son of God, the existence of God, the fact that God rewards and punishes, Heaven, Hell, Judgment, what the Church is and Her real authority to teach.”

Father’s love for married couples was very apparent when he said, “Everywhere we teach the Billings Method of controlling births. We never fail to expose the condom and the pill and the coil for the damnable things they are. We offer people the alternative of Natural Family Planning.”

As he continued, we were stunned as we listened to the evangelization program this man has set up for himself and his young religious men and women.

“Even if it’s a small town, we stay for a week,” he began. “We pray with the people and teach them to pray. We break the people up into homogeneous groups. The men gather as early as 5:00 a.m. before they go to their work in the fields. We get the women as they are finishing their chores, about 10:00 a.m. We get the children as soon as they get out of school and the teens at 4:30 in the afternoon. We gather the whole town together again at 7:00 at night and we preach the Word of God with joy and power, and the people are converted and they love the Church.

“After giving the mission to the whole town, we give retreats. For the young men and the young women, we give three-day, separate retreats for each. We have couples’ retreats for the married couples and retreats for those couples who are living together, having had no priest for a wedding. We even give retreats to couples who cannot marry and are living in adultery. We want to make them conscious of God’s demands on them to do good works, like bringing up their children to go to Mass. We teach them so someday they can come back to the grace of God. We don’t fudge and tell them they can receive Holy Communion, just that we hope someday they can come back to the sacraments.”

With no priest to serve these people daily, how does Father Pablo expect this missionary work to be sustained? “We give birth to local communities of boys and communities of girls and we teach them to go out and evangelize. We gear our instruction to their receiving the Sacraments: ‘I want to make a good Confession’ and ‘How to respect and adore Our Lord and receive Him.’ We prepare children for First Communion and we get couples ready for marriage.”

Father spends about three months a year in the United States, traveling to speak at parishes and conferences. “The bishops in Mexico don’t want me to spend so much time away. They gave us four acres of beautiful land about 150 yards above the Pacific Ocean, off which cool breezes flow all the time. We’ve added to that land because we must build a convent-motherhouse for the Sisters and a seminary for the Brothers.

“We hope to fulfill God’s design to send missionaries, men and women, priests and nuns, on fire with the love of Jesus Christ, well-prepared with all the sacred sciences of scripture, theology, philosophy, everything essential to any Catholic missionary: Thomist philosophy, the teachings of the Church, the existential knowledge of Sacred Scripture. We want to fulfill God’s design to send these men and women out all over Latin America and the United States and then all over the world.”

A LIFE OF POVERTY

We learned the conditions under which Father and the members of the new religious orders live --not from him but from a friend, Gerry Bouvier, who has visited there and took many of the pictures in this article.

“The home that the Brothers and Father live in started as just a walled house,” Gerry told us. “There wasn’t a roof so they had to raise money to do a few improvements on it, like keeping the water off them. There are no windows so the flies and insects come in. The Brothers live in small cubicles about 6 foot by 9 foot, separated by sheets of plywood. They sleep on hard bunks with a little mat and some have a small table.

“Father Pablo, at one time, had an office with a desk and bed but he gave that up to others. Now, right outside the window to that office, he sleeps in a lean-to with the chickens. Father’s community lives in poverty. The people Father and the Brothers are serving may bring them a chicken, in gratitude. The people have no money. They come to the door and give the brothers food and that is basically all they eat.”

Gerry continued: “The poor share with the poor. There is no electricity and no phone because they cannot afford it. Right now people from all over the country try but cannot reach him to arrange for missions. When Father talks about going to the forsaken, this is what he means. Yet these people are so rich in their thirst for God. Every time Father preaches, he is constantly teaching the Catholic faith that the people hunger for.”

The two of us had done an interview with Father Pablo about six months before this one, then lost the tape. It was a case of saying, “I’ll put this here so it will be safe until we can transcribe it” and then forgetting where that “safe” place is. We looked for hours and then days and never found it. Finally we had to admit to Father what had happened, knowing full well how very limited and precious his time is.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said with a laugh. “The Lord must have other things for me to say.”

And indeed the second interview was much different from his first. Take, for example, this beautiful, prophetic statement Father made that gave us chills as he spoke: “The glorious strengthening of the Church is going to happen quite soon in history. We must love the Church and work in and for Her. We must believe in the Holy Father. We must believe in the Holy Father, the bishops and the priests and know that the Church shall engender, give birth, in the world, to a new civilization, a civilization of life and of truth and of love. It may not be in my lifetime but I see its stirrings already. Her beauty shall be seen and Her voice shall be heard and it shall be a more magnificent beauty and a clearer voice than has ever been heard in history before.”

Father Straub ended the interview with these words: “I want to say to all of you, my very dear friends, readers of Medjugorge Magazine, give yourself to prayer. Pray with your whole heart. Pray, ‘My Jesus, my All. You love me and I love you.’ Pray, ‘Purest Virgin Mary, help me.’ Pray like this virtually all day long. Unite yourself in perfect love with Jesus and Mary. Pray! Let faith and love and hope be the motivating force and meaning of your whole life—faith in Jesus and Mary, hope in their mercy, and love of them, expressed in giving them pleasure at all times by doing the Divine Will.”

Note: We are very grateful to Larry and Mary Sue Eck for permission to reprint this article from Medjugorge Magazine, Winter 1996-97 issue.. Once again, please visit http://www.medjugormag.com. A series of eight beautiful photographs accompanied this article. We hope to scan them and have them available on http://www.windowtotruth.com as soon as possible.

St. Alphonsus’s Prayer for Zeal

O my Lord Jesus Christ,
how can I thank Thee enough for having
called me to the same work Thou
didst Thyself on earth – that is,
to labor for the salvation of souls?
How have I deserved this honor, the reward
after having so grievously offended Thee,
and caused others also to do so?
Thou dost, indeed, O my Lord,
call me to help Thee in this great undertaking.
I will serve Thee with all my strength.
Behold, I offer Thee all my labor,
and even my blood, in order to obey Thee.
Nor do I by this aspire to gratify my
own inclination, or to gain applause of esteem;
I desire nothing else than to see Thee
loved by all men as Thou deservest.
I prize my happy lot and consider myself
fortunate in having been chosen by Thee
for this great work, in which I protest
that I will renounce all the praises
of men and all self-satisfaction,
and will seek only Thy glory.
To Thee be all the honor and satisfaction,
and to me only all the hardships,
the blame, and the reproaches.
Accept, O Lord, this offering that I,
a miserable sinner, who wish to love Thee
and to see Thee loved by others,
make of myself to Thee,
and give me strength to execute it.

Most holy Mary, my advocate,
who so greatly lovest souls, help me.  Amen.

A transcription of a speech delivered by Father Pablo Straub, C.Ss.R.,to the Immaculate Heart of Mary National Home School and Parenting Conference, 2004.

Here we are, not by coincidence, from many, many different places --not by coincidence-- we were brought here by God for His Holy and Happy Purposes. Here we are. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

What is truth? What …is…truth?

We repeat the title of this meditation with respect, in awe. We repeat it as a prayer: “Jesus, teach us the truth.”

What is truth? The question, in fact, just as you heard it, came out of the cynical mouth of a cynical man. You may recall that question. I’ll say something about the cynical man in just a second. But what appears in the Word of God coming out of the mouth of a cynical man: “What is truth?” We ask that question now in awe, with reverence. I even dare say, seeking Him whom we adore: what is truth?

Now the cynical man: Pontius Pilate. You ask yourself why does the Word of God include such a sickly question in the mouth of a man who is about to kill the author of Life? Pontius Pilate. The day during the hours of the judgment of Jesus that Good Friday,
Pontius Pilate was receiving messages from messengers frequently. His wife sent word, “Don’t have anything to do against this holy man, I had a dream about him last night, don’t have anything to do against him.” And Pilate, cowardly, just got more and more scared. He knew this man was innocent --utterly different-- but innocent.

And Jesus said, This is why I came into the world: to bear witness to the truth.

Apparently, a couple of seconds before Jesus came to the end of that sentence somebody was calling Pilate off to the wings, I suppose with another message, and then he apparently tosses over his shoulder the sickly question that we are talking about: “Truth, what’s that?”

What is truth? Truth, what’s that?

I want to do a snapshot or two now of children. Don’t they from around the age of maybe 30 months, maybe before, just keep asking “why? why?” It’s good that they have that word in their mouth.  Because that question “why” is a sign that the child has an immortal soul. The human creature is the only creature on the face of the earth…that is to say, in all of physical creation…angels of course are non-physical creation…in all of physical creation the human being is the only being that forms the word, “Why?” That wants to know “Why?”

In fact, isn’t it true, that children jump to a universal? A child wants a universal principle that explains every detail he sees.

I remember my nieces and nephews used to call me Uncle Father Paul, Uncle Father Pablo. And Uncle Father Pablo meant this: the black clothes, the big rosary. The rosary then only had 15 decades --as soon as the Pope talked of another five we added five – twenty-decade rosary. But to my nephews and nieces “Uncle Father Paul” meant a big big man
--I’m not so big but you always look big to a small child—with this long black thing on and a big black rosary. And one day they drove up to the seminary where there were a hundred of us or more, and as the car drove up one of the little nephews or nieces I forget which, said, “Look at all the Uncle Father Pauls.”

Now all the really cute and funny things that children say-- just analyze it-- come from their seeing a detail and wanting to find the universal principle. What’s an “Uncle Father Paul”? It’s someone in a long black thing with a big big rosary. So we see a whole bunch of people wearing a long black thing and a big black rosary, well, don’t they all have to be, by logic, “Uncle Father Pauls”?

And just analyze it—all the really funny things that children say come from universalizing…. like a baby will universalize that mothers breast feed, right?… And then the first time a little child sees a mother pop a bottle out of a bag and put it in a baby’s mouth --I know of one case where a little three-year-old girl saw that for the first time-- the lady who popped the bottle out and put it in her baby’s mouth was a doctor…and when the doctor who was a friend of this little three-year-old’s mom went home...it was just a little visit of friends…the little three-year-old said, “Mom, I guess lady doctors don’t breast feed.”

In other words, universal principle: mothers breast feed. Why would this mother not breast feed? She’s a doctor. So the child jumps to a universal exception: if you’re a doctor, you don’t breast feed. Which of course is very funny.

See, it’s an evidence of the hunger of the human mind to come in every line of thought to universal principles. You can see it --well, I don’t know exactly what age, I’m going to say about 30 months, but you who bring up children may know the dawn of that “why” might come much younger, maybe as young as 20 months, I don’t know-- but you see it, the hunger, in the human being, to know truth.

Now where does it come from? When God had made on the face of the earth everything except us …Genesis says about all the other things, except us: and God saw that it was good. But after He made us, Genesis says: God saw that it was very good. That’s not said about anything else. Only about us.

But let us go back to before God made us. Let us make man in our image. Let the likeness go for just a second. The likeness we’ll just set aside for a moment, and then we’ll come back to it again. When God was about to make us He said, let us make man in our image. God doesn’t say that about anything else...doesn’t say that about little black cats playing with balls of thread…doesn’t say that funny little puppies romping on the lawn.

He just says that about us. Let us make man in our image. Now, there’s a conjunct of things that makes us be God’s image, but the first thing that makes us be God’s image is that we are the only creature on the face of the earth that’s interested in truth.

Did you ever catch one dog saying to another, “Now, tell me the truth?” They don’t perceive truth. They have nothing to perceive it with.

We hunger for the truth, and truth is perceived by the intellect. Truth is perceived by the intellect --that marvelous, marvelous faculty-- intellect. The intellect can know truth, and man has a yearning for truth. If you didn’t have a yearning for truth, you wouldn’t be sitting here listening, somewhat enthralled by the topic, about something you can’t even see – about something you can’t even see! I’m not showing you pictures. I’m not projecting a video. I don’t even have any illustrations. And here you are listening, you yourselves, just like the children, are vibrating evidence that the human mind, the human heart yearns for truth.

Do you not think this is one of principal things that concerned Jesus when he came? Let’s just look at some of the things he said.

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

Jesus says the truth makes you free. And the Holy Father in his marvelous encyclical, “Veritatis Splendor,” the Splendor of the Truth, says: we know that there can be no freedom --no freedom-- if it is not based on truth. Because God Himself said you shall know the truth and the truth –and the truth only-- shall make you free.

Let me just say in passing, as a slight tangent, but it’s quite necessary nowadays: people implicitly define freedom –people talk about our freedom, our liberty-- people implicitly define freedom as doing what you blessed please. That’s how people define freedom: doing what you blessed please.

Freedom doesn’t mean that. Freedom means… speaking now of another faculty that God gave us –intellect, to know the truth-- and now: free will. To freely make choices: that’s what freedom means. You have, I have, a will capable of making free choices.

And you know also from Jesus’ mouth that we shall be judged, every one of us, on the basis of those choices. Those who freely choose the good, go to heaven. Those who freely choose evil and repent not thereof, go to eternal loss. So freedom doesn’t mean do what you blessed please.

Freedom means you have been given by God...you as an individual person have the faculty, the power in your person of making free choices. And then you will have to give an account of all of those free choices.  And when God said let us make man in our image, that possessive pronoun “our,” which is plural, is a reflection of the most Holy Trinity.

The Church Fathers never called it a revelation because nobody understood that that is what it meant. But it is like a foreshadowing of the revealing of the most blessed Trinity –let us make man in our image-- it means now we shall make a physical being with an immortal spiritual soul. Up till then you had angels --spiritual beings without a body-- and you also had the physical universe, bodies without spirit. Let me say that again:  up till that moment you had angels --pure spirits-- and you had physical beings, bodies without spirit. And now God says we are going to make a physical being that is also a spiritual being. Unique. Up till now you either had to be an angel, a purely spiritual being, or a purely bodily being. Now let us make man in our image because God is the Truth, and God is Love, and He clearly, very clearly, so defines Himself.

Did He not say, when He came, “I am the Truth”? Six foot, 176 pounds, and He stood there and He said, “I am the Truth.” Then His best friend, the beloved disciple John, who stood at the foot of the cross, and received Jesus’ mother later, stood next to her at the foot of the cross… he repeated and repeated later on in his old age every time the Christians would go by his little house, and they would ask, “John, you walked with God. What is he like?”...And John would just repeat, “God…. Is…. Love.”

Or as they sometimes sing it (singing): “God is love.”

So God has said..."I am the Truth” ...and His best friend, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said… “God is Love.”

Let me add again, just in passing, the most sickly phrase that can come out of a human mouth is that phrase you hear almost every day: “Eh, everything is relative.”

That’s the most sickly phrase a human being can say. Let me tell you a couple of things that are not relative. Truth is not relative because God is not relative, and He has said: “I am the Truth.” And Love is not relative because Jesus’ best friend said: “God is Love.”

And since God cannot be relative, neither can Truth, neither can Love.

Our perception of truth is indeed relative. I hope to know more truth tomorrow than I know today, and if I can grow in the perception of truth therefore my perception of truth is relative...are you reading me? Same with love. I hope to love you more tomorrow than I love you today, which is already much. I hope to love you more tomorrow…now if I can grow in the living of love then my living of love is indeed relative.

But God doesn’t know just a little bit more truth every day. God is Truth Itself. Now, when you say Truth is Absolute and indeed it is because God is; and that Love is Absolute and indeed it is because God is.  If you say that Truth and Love are Absolute, then what’s left over to be relative?

Except, like, the price of a pound of ground chuck…. or a big gallon jug of milk. Those little things can be relative.

And yet, perhaps...what I’m about to say now is not a dogma of faith. It’s a reflection, very personal: perhaps the characteristic of the culture of death is the implicit defining of truth as whatever forwards the agenda of an individual. I’m going to say that again.  In the culture of death, there’s no doubt about this --there could be a doubt about as to whether this is its principal characteristic, but there is no doubt about the following statement: in the culture of death, truth is implicitly defined as whatever forwards the agenda of a given group or even of an individual. Whatever carries forward the agenda.

You know and I know that pro-life people in their demonstrations and their prayers before the abortuaries are a particularly peaceful people. But it did forward the agenda of groups like NOW and it did forward the agenda of pro-abortion groups to label these people as “religious extremists,” even “murderous thugs.” These very, very good --I even dare say holy people-- who carry the signs and give out the literature and say the prayers and do save thousands of babies…These good people who kept the almost extinguished wick alive… these people kept it alive during three decades of clerical indifference.

To characterize those people as religious extremists, as murderous thugs --well, of course, that’s the truth if you define the truth as whatever forwards your agenda-- but I say to you that the truth is not made by the human mind. The human mind and the human intellect are made by God. And the first thing that makes us be the image of God --the intellect-- I say to you that the intellect is not for the making of truth. Human beings do not make truth. The intellect that God gave us is for the discovery of truth.

I do not with my mind project these flowers. My mind is not for the projecting of flowers or to make them exist here, or maybe in mid-air or anywhere. My mind is to perceive through my senses the presence of flowers and to meditate upon what flowers are all about. I don’t make the flowers.

My mind is not placing here this lovely statue of the Blessed Mother. The statue is there. My mind is for the perceiving of the statue and its meaning. It doesn’t put it there.

Let us apply this to the faith itself. If this were a church --and there are about 200 of us here-- if this were a church and there were here a tabernacle and we all came into the church and we knew that inside that tabernacle are consecrated hosts… we know by the Catholic faith that those consecrated hosts are Jesus: His body, His blood, His soul, His divinity. St. Alphonsus adds: His merits are there, too.

St. Alphonsus has five things that he says: body, blood, soul, divinity, and merits. They’re all there. He is there, and where He is, His merits are there.

Now suppose…God forbid… God forbid…just suppose that we were all to lose the faith… God forbid…I’m just giving you an example to clarifying what I’m saying...and we were all to deny it. Either because they paid us or because we went crazy, why else would you deny it? If we were all to deny it, that consecrated host would continue to be Jesus because it is not our thought that projects Jesus-ness into the host. The reality of Jesus being there: that is what makes the host be Jesus. Because it is.

And how do we know? Because he said so: Take and eat, this is my body; take and drink, this is my blood. And how do we know that we are interpreting it correctly? Because it is not our interpretation. It’s the teaching of the Church to which He said: I am with you all days even to the end of the history of the human race and this world.

And He even said, I’ll speak with my Father and He will send the Spirit who will remain with you and recall to your minds all that I have taught you, the Spirit of Truth. Truth.

Because as simple, natural human beings – just as simple, natural human beings-- we can know truth. We can know created truth. And, by the grace of God, we can know the precise truth about God Himself.

You know why I want to home school my seminarians and my Missionary Sisters? Can I tell you why? Because I want them to fall in love with the truth. In the last analysis, I’ll bet that that’s the main reason you are home schooling your children: because you want them to fall in love with the truth.

First of all, make sure they’re hearing the truth. And not just hearing it, but falling in love with it. Because if all you do is know truth but don’t fall in love with it, all you can do is pass exams. Who cares? But if you fall in love with the truth…oh my…oh my…if you fall in love with the truth, you are going to set the world on fire.

Did you know something else? I’m leaning heavily now on St. Thomas Aquinas and isn’t he pretty much the best to lean on? With all the reverence and love towards St. Augustine, of course whom Thomas quotes so very much; I doubt there is a single saint whom Thomas quotes more than he quotes Augustine. But leaning now heavily on Thomas, Thomas says very clearly and not just in passing --this is pretty much the soul of Thomism-- that the essence of the happiness of heaven is to know...Let me look at the word “know” --Know means to perceive--and, in this case, perceive the truth. The essence of the happiness of heaven is the perception of truth.

How can you talk about it in this world? How can you?

You never get bored in heaven because it is one eternal now. You know marriage itself can come to an end because it’s dissolved in death. That’s why widows are allowed to marry and widowers ...but you also have to think, don’t you, that a man and a woman who in this world shared a sacrament must have something special between them in heaven, don’t you think? Yet God is all in all.

I try to represent it this way. Maybe I’ve told you this before. I hope you don’t mind hearing it again. Mom and Dad are Joseph and Catherine. I buried them, respectively, 15 and 25 years ago. And I yearn to see them.

I am indeed the fruit of a loving, sacramental, total self-giving .. in Jesus...from the part of Joe from Queens and Catherine from Brooklyn. And I’m trying to illustrate now, trying to communicate the truth of what Heaven is all about. I picture my father in heaven, after the Resurrection, kind of like this:

“Kitty, do you see ‘em?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“Where are the kids?”

“Right here.”

“Okay.”

So there has to be something: they shared the sacrament of Jesus loving his Church. But God is all in all and the essence of the beatific vision...and Thomas calls it “vision” because vision is a kind of knowing, is it not? When you have a vision, you’re knowing with your eyes, seeing is knowing with your eyes. That’s why Thomas carefully chooses the word “vision.” Beatific means happifying or happy-making. The essence of the happy-making vision is this: you look at God and you know Him. And He comes into you communicating His being, His essence, to you, to your knowledge directly without any pictures, without human words.

In the way Jesus said it: Enter into the joy of your Lord.

Jesus, in the particular judgment, isn’t even going to say, “I’m going to give you a whole lot of joy,” but rather: Enter into the joy of your Lord. And the joy of heaven consists in knowing face-to-face, directly, and with compenetration, knowing He Who Is The Truth: knowing The One Who Is The Truth.

All the “why” of your babyhood will be answered. It’s all there, because He is the Truth
and you will have the Truth. And then having the Truth you will so fall in love with the Truth as to never lose Him. And so it is essentially the knowing....and then the consequences of knowing...the loving.

That’s why Thomas finishes his “Adorate” by saying, “Jesus upon my present gaze hidden behind sacramental veils --because you’re looking and you see what looks like bread and smells like bread and tastes like bread --sacramental veils—Jesus upon my present gaze hidden behind sacramental veils give me that which I pine for day and night: that when You reveal Yourself to me directly, I may be happy at the sight of You for all eternity.”

That’s why you have babies. That’s why you home school them.

God love you.

ABBA!: On Fatherhood

By Father Pablo Straub

(from The Alphonsian, Vol. 1, No. 2, June 19, 1994)

To those of you who are, happy Father’s Day. I write this two days before Father’s Day…

On May 12, 2002 Pope John Paul II described his vision for the use of the Internet by Christians.  Here is the text of his talk on the subject.

PONTIFICIUM CONSILIUM DE COMMUNICATIONIBUS SOCIALIBUS
MESSAGE OF THE HOLY FATHER FOR THE 36th WORLD COMMUNICATIONS DAY THEME:
“Internet: A New Forum for Proclaiming the Gospel”

Sunday, May 12, 2002

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

1. The Church in every age continues the work begun on the day of Pentecost, when the Apostles, in the power of the Holy Spirit, went forth into the streets of Jerusalem to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ in many tongues (cf. Acts 2:5-11). Through the succeeding centuries, this evangelizing mission spread to the far corners of the earth, as Christianity took root in many places and learned to speak the diverse languages of the world, always in obedience to Christ’s command to preach the Gospel to every nation (cf. Mt 28:19-20).