Dear friends in Christ,              
                                                                On the Ladder of Love

Let's talk about love and levels of love. Love is so central to Christian identity that it becomes inconceivable to identify oneself as a Christian without visible marks of love as a testimony to the claim. God created us in love and for love, and He is the source of that love. As St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a 13th-century great lover of God and the last of the Church Father, once said, "Love is the fountain of life, and the soul which does not drink from it cannot be called alive." But we ought to love God above all things and with all our life. There is a hierarchy of love. The goal of everyone created in the image and likeness of God is to prioritize their love for the author and source of love above other subjects of legitimate love. It is of utmost importance and highest priority that we love God first to love others rightly. Jesus calls us to love him more than we love our family. He teaches us to order priorities right when it comes to who we love most. To love God as He should be loved is a process and implies lifetime perseverance and progress.
St. Bernard wrote about four categories of the love of God that serves as a helpful guide as it throws light on the perfection of love.
The first degree is selfish love, that is, loving yourself for your own sake. Despite our awareness that God called us to love Him first and above all, the natural impulse is to love self first over God. This selfish love is a consequence of Original sin. It is part of our flawed human nature to self indulge in love for oneself to the detriment of our neighbors; hence we have to strive to overcome this excessive love of self to the expense of the love of God and neighbor. We are called to let this self-love overflow to others and not limited to oneself alone. We have to love God first to love ourselves rightly.
The second degree of love involves loving God for your own blessing- dependence on God. At this stage, you now love God but primarily for your own sake, the love of God for our benefits. At this level of love, a Christian only give thanks to God on account of His goodness to him. It is similar to what people in the secular world call friends with benefits. This type of lover tends to give thanks to God only when he or she receives blessings from Him. This form of love is not yet perfected, though an improvement over the first degree of love.
The third degree of love implies loving God for God's own sake. At this degree of love, a Christian begins to have intimacy with God. This kind of love is love without self-interest. It is a love that develops from intimacy with God and the discovery of his incredible goodness. It comes from actually having an experiential knowledge of his kindness and mercy. During this stage of love, we love for love's sake, a pure and spontaneous love, not love purely for self-interest.
The fourth degree of love is self-love for God's sake; it is a profound union with God's love. This stage of love at first appears contradictory because we know that self-love is a lower form of love, but when we ponder on it, it is the highest form of love that can only be attained momentarily here on earth and fully in heaven. At this height of love, the lover of God loses himself in God's love. To reach this stage of love is to be truly Christ-like, to be totally immersed in his grace. You decrease and Christ increase to the extent that he is the only one that exists. This highest level of love can be attained only permanently in heavenly as a reward for loving God alone and always.
As people who profess the love of Jesus above all others, let us consider the practice of love and make progress in St. Bernard's proposal on the love of God. 1 John 4:8 tells us that "God is love…we cannot say we know God without love" To love as God wants us to love, Jesus tells us in this Sunday's Gospel, we must take up our cross and follow Him, we must lose our lives in him to gain our lives. The only way to make progress from selfish love to agape love is to die to sin and live "for God in Christ Jesus" (Romans 6:11).
St. Bernard of Clairvaux is not only a lover of God but a troubadour of agape love and you will derive spiritual benefits from singing or frequently meditating on his love lyrics that follow:

 Jesus, our only joy be Thou.  As Thou our prize wilt be; Jesus, be Thou our glory now and thru eternity.         
                                                               
 In the Perfect Love of God,  

Fr. Bernard Oniwe, OP
 

Dear friends in Christ,       

                                                         Fear No One, Speak the Truth

The Gospel of this Sunday's Mass tells us not to be afraid to reveal, make known, speak, and proclaim to the world all that Jesus taught his followers. Jesus taught much about life liberating truths and instructed his Church to do likewise without mincing words or with ambiguity for fear of how the world would respond to radical forms of these sacred truths. It is easy to get intimidated by rejection or hostility from those presented the demanding doctrines of Jesus, but the Lord reminds us that God has got our backs. If God in his providence places value on mere sparrows, how much more human beings created in his image and likeness, God will see to our preservation from dangers that will come on account of the proclamation of divine truth.
We should never compromise these truths out of fear of losing our lives, friendships, family, or any other earthly goods. We ought to proclaim Gospel truths boldly whether the condition is comfortable or not; what is at stake is too vital to begin watering down these truths or shying away from throwing light on them before the world. Like prophet Jeremiah, we must trust in God who "rescued the life of the poor from the power of the wicked" (Jer. 20:13). Whenever we speak the truth about God's plan for humanity, we should be ready to bear insults and face rejections from even our loved ones, and we should have recourse to God, praying for his favor and help (Ps. 69: 8-17).
Pope St. John Paul II said in his famous homily on October 22, 1978, "Do not be afraid….do not be afraid to welcome Christ and accept his power." I say to you, too, do not be afraid to tell the world there is hell, and there is heaven. Do not be afraid to proclaim that Jesus is the Son of God and only He can save the world from despair. Do not be afraid to tell your friends and strangers alike that they need to open wide the doors of their hearts to Jesus, their Savior. Do not be afraid to bear witness to the Gospel truth concerning the dignity of all human life from conception to natural death. Do not be afraid to speak for justice for the poor. Do not be afraid to be a voice on the rooftops condemning racial injustice and senseless violence in our world; do not be afraid to be a prophetic voice for our time like Jeremiah was for his time. Do not be afraid to welcome Christ and his power to save.
As we get into the summer season, please stay safe on your vacations and travels, and do not forget your home parish, St. Peter. Stay in touch and share your summer experiences with us, especially the moments of God's providence and grace, the many instances you acknowledged Jesus and his Gospel before people you encountered. Never miss an opportunity to put into use the abundant graces you receive from the Sacraments and the Word of the Spirit.
I use this opportunity to wish all our fathers-including the "father" writing this message, a blessed Father's Day celebration. Our fathers are like St. Joseph, protecting and caring for their families, please say words of thanks to our fathers this week. We love our fathers, proclaim it on the housetops!

In Christ, our Help,                     

Fr. Bernard Oniwe, O.P.
 
 

Dear friends in Christ,           
                                                         Come, Let Us Adore Him
I have a deep love for Eucharistic hymns because they aid my solemn worship of the Lord Jesus Christ in the sacrament of his body and blood. Adoro Devote Te and Pange Lingua, composed by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, are my favorites of as many as five Eucharistic hymns he wrote for the celebration of Corpus Christi. These Latin hymns convey the theology of the Real Presence in a poetic and passionate tone; they simplify the essence of the mystery without a pretense of evaporating its complexity. Listening to the Latin text of the hymns set in Gregorian chant does something to my soul.  I don't need to understand every word of it; I just allow the beauty and elegance of the language and music to envelop and uplift my soul, like a man in Christ caught up to the third heaven ( 1 Cor. 12:2). Singing the English translation of the hymns, I must admit, does make the experience of worship more cognitive and impactful. Understanding or lack of it thereof, these hymns aid my worship of the Eucharistic Lord truly present to eyes of faith and adored by a heart made of love.
Let's consider the first verse of  Adoro te Devote briefly to illustrate my point. A typical and traditional translation of the Latin text takes this form: 
                                               "O Godhead hid, devoutly I adore Thee,
                                                Who truly art within the forms before me;
                                               To Thee my heart I bow with bended knee,
                                                As failing quite in contemplating Thee.

The hymn addresses the Eucharist, whether hidden in the tabernacle or exposed in the monstrance for adoration during Corpus Christi procession, as a concealed God worthy of worship and contemplation on bended knee. Capuchin Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher to the Papal household, captures the theology of Real Presence and call to worship contained in the hymn in the following words:

"In every stanza of the Adoro Te Devote there is a theological affirmation and an invocation which is the prayerful response of the soul to the mystery. The theological truth recalled in the first stanza refers to the manner of the presence of Christ in the Eucharistic species. The Latin expression 'vere latitas' is charged with meaning, it means: he is hidden, but he really is (where the accent is on 'vere,' only the reality of the presence) and it also means: he truly is, but hidden (where the accent is on 'latitas,' on the sacramental character of this presence)."

For the last three months, most Catholics have been without direct access to his Real Presence, to Jesus hidden in the Eucharistic species. He was hidden (using the word in a different sense here) from us because we shut the doors to the church, but he was nevertheless always present in the church. Did we for once stop by the church entrance when we drove by to genuflect or reverence Eucharistic Lord hidden in the tabernacles of our church? Were our faith fledging and our heart pulse low in love for Jesus in the Eucharist just because the closed-door hid him from our sights? I invite you on this solemnity of Corpus Christi to renew your faith and ignite in your heart the fire of love for Eucharistic Jesus by worshiping him, the hidden Godhead.

I would like to invite you to spend an hour of public worship of Jesus exposed in the monstrance this Sunday evening from 6:30 -7:30 PM. Come in your cars, bring your chairs along and come, let us adore him devoutly, the second person of the Holy Trinity.          
                                
In His Real Presence,       

Fr. Bernard Oniwe, OP
 

Dear friends in Christ,             
                                                     Grace, Love, and Fellowship

The concluding verse of 2nd Corinthians is one of the most evident Trinitarian passages of the entire New Testament: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all" (2 Cor. 13:13). The verse expresses a divine blessing from St. Paul to his Christian brethren in Corinthians. This scriptural blessing is composed of three inter-related God attributes bestowed on all believers. The preposition "of" in verse 13 is used as a function word to specify qualities of relationship and possession among the three divine persons of the Holy Trinity, the central mystery of Christian faith. The one and only God reveal himself to us in terms of relationship and specific attributes of each divine person. Each time we bless ourselves with the sign of the Cross, we not only recall our Trinitarian baptism but also invoke and release attributes of this divine blessing on ourselves, that is, grace, love, and fellowship. These blessings should mark our lives and be with us always, especially as we reopen our Church to Mass with the congregation.
May the grace of God be with us at this time and always because it is only his super-abundance favor that sustains us through the experience of tragedies in this "vale of tears." It is only by our participation in the life of God through grace that we can live victoriously in our world full of sorrows, tears and blood brought about by the pandemic, as well as the murder, violence, and injustice overshadowing our country in the past week. May the love of God be with us always as we strive to make present in our community the self-giving love attribute of Jesus Christ.  Non-Christians recognized the early Christians by their demonstration of sacrificial love for one another and strangers alike. May the fellowship of God be with us as we try to build up a community of charity. We are to build a culture of solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized by being attentive to their cry as Jesus did. As the U.S. Catholic Bishop's statement of May 21, 2020, says to us, "we should be doing a lot of listening right now" to the cry for justice. Our Christian faith calls us to identify with the pains and mourning of every person created in the image of Christ. We are to build a fellowship of equals though different in experiences, just like the equality though distinctness between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We have to be trinitarian in our approach to life.
"May the force be with you. Always" is a catchphrase made famous by Obi-Wan Kenobi character in George Lucas's Star Wars films. I believe the writer of the phrase was drawing inspiration from the Trinitarian blessings in 2 Corinthians 13:13. Could I borrow the format by saying, May the grace be with you always. May the love be with you always. May the fellowship be with you always. In our ongoing battle against the pandemics and injustice and violence in our world, may the example of the Holy Trinity inspire and guide us.
In conclusion, I must admit that I am filled with joy as I welcome you back to Mass with the congregation. We are going to move back gradually into our regular schedule. Please be patient with me as I navigate these new waters with you. Things are going to be done differently, including mass schedules and location. In the coming weeks, I will come out with plans for Adult Initiation, First Holy Communion and Confirmation. Visit our parish website regularly for updates. Thanks to all of you, you have been gracious and supportive. I pray for you always and know you pray for me as well. Let us continue practicing social distancing and wearing face masks. We are victorious in Christ Jesus.
 
In the Joy of the Lord,     

 Fr. Bernard Oniwe, OP