• God is in the business of showing His creatures unconditional love, and this will never change. It is part of His very being. God can only be good to us, because He is goodness itself. God can only love us, because He is love itself.
• We learn from the first chapter of Genesis that God created us in His own image. “Let us make man to our image and likeness”, God says to Himself.
• This not only indicates what God made us to be; it also indicates what we must strive to be. We are made in the likeness of God, but we must also strive to hard to be like God.
• What I am going to claim in this sermon is that we especially do that through the pursuit of our vocation, whether that be the priesthood, the religious life, or the married life.

Unconditional love in a vocation

• There is a special quality in a vocation, in that it demands of us unconditional love. We are required to commit ourselves up front to pursue a certain path for the rest of our lives, to stay on that path and never deviate from it.
• This is what married couples do when they exchange vows before the altar; this is what religious do when they make their perpetual vows; this is what a priest does when he is ordained.
• These vocations require unconditional love because of the fact that they do not know up front all that their vocation is going to require of them. They make a commitment up front to be faithful to a path but they do not know all that is on that path.
• Spouses, for instance, tell one another that they are going to stay by one another for life, no matter what happens in the future. If one of them gets cancer, if their house burns down and they lose their life savings, if they have quadruplets, no matter what, they will stick together.
• Spouses offer this unconditional love to one another when they marry. Priests and religious offer it to God. When a priest is ordained, he dedicates his life for the salvation of souls. He says, “I give myself unconditionally for the salvation of souls, for life, no matter what that may demand of me.
• We know that, for priests, sometimes the demands are costly. A priest does not know how the years of his priesthood are going to play out when he is ordained, and yet he commits himself.
• He may be asked to leave his home country and live overseas. He may have a superior who does not understand him. He may have faithful who do not listen to him and make bad decisions for themselves and their children. He may at times feel as if he is a failure. He may suffer an apparent excommunication just a week after he is ordained.
• It is beautiful to think that God created us human beings in His image and likeness and then also created ways to live our live that help us resemble Him, and that those paths of life require unconditional love of us.
• He created marriage at the same time that He created the human race. Then, when He became incarnate, He instituted two vocations that are intrinsically supernatural: the priesthood and the religious life.
• But Our Lord did not only institute the life of the Catholic priesthood and the life of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. He also lived them. He showed us how to resemble God in these paths of life.

• In response to the consecrations of four SSPX bishops last Wednesday, Pope Leo XIV has taken exceedingly strong measures. He has declared that bishops, priests, and all formal adherents of the SSPX are excommunicated. That means those who “participate habitually in the celebrations of the Society of St. Pius X and formally share formally their doctrinal positions.”
• These measures are extremely harsh because the Vatican has refused to use the penalty of excommunication for many very serious situations in the Church in the past 60 years. You can deny the Catholic faith publicly, you can offer very scandalous Masses, you can show approval for same sex couples, for divorce and other forms of immorality.
• But these actions have not resulted in excommunication by those who have done them, in the Church, since the Second Vatican Council. And, certainly, it is extreme and novel for the Vatican to not only excommunicate the bishops of the SSPX, but to excommunicate hundreds of thousands of Catholic faithful!
• How is it possible for Pope Leo to take such extreme measures? Even the secular media outlets have been astonished by what they call the “exceptional harshness” of the decree. The contrast between how outright heretics in the Church are treated in comparison with traditional Catholic would seem to indicate that Rome is seized by a certain Tradition Derangement Syndrome.
• The one thing that Rome does not want to see in the Church is for the New Mass and the Second Vatican Council to be challenged. It does not want the traditional movement to have the means to continue. It does not want lay faithful to be traditional Catholics.
• This situation is very sad because it is a situation of a father treating his own children with great injustice. And the father is the representative of Christ on this earth.
• There is one section of the Church that is booming today, that is full of good, devout Catholics and large Catholic families, while the rest of the Church is dying. And this is the one section of the Church that the Pope harshly punishes.
• Rome is putting immense pressure on you faithful to stop attending with the SSPX and be assimilated into the Conciliar Church. Instead of promising to start fighting heresy and guaranteeing the practice of the traditional Catholic faith to you, they are offering full communion in exchange for you becoming a Vatican II Catholic.

• I was listening to a debate recently between an atheist and a theist. The theist was arguing that, if there is no God, then there is no objective good. It is impossible to say what is good and what is evil.
• The atheist replied by asking whether God was a person? And the answer was that, yes, God is a person. But then, said the atheist, if God is a person, then He is a subject. And so God definition of good and evil is merely subjective.
• This answer by the atheist completely fails to understand what it means for there to be a God Who creates us. It is true that God is a subject, but as Creator of our world, He makes an objective order for His creation.
• By His act of creation, God establishes for us what we are and what we are made for. This determines what is good and evil for us.
• For example, God created us to have physical bodies that need air, food, drink, and sleep. This makes it good for us to provide ourselves those things for the health of our bodies and evil for us to use them in an unhealthy way.
• Another example would be the institution of marriage. God created humans as male and female and gave them the capacity to bring forth children through their union and only in that way. This is what makes marriage to be a good thing. By that, I mean the union of a man and a woman that is for life, that is exclusive, and that has for its purposes the procreation of children and the mutual support of the spouses.
• The fact that God created us in a certain way has determined for us what is good and what is evil for us. We call this reality “natural law”. It is the law that goes with having the nature that God has given us.
• This law is objective, in the sense that it is the same for every human being. It does not change based on where you are from, how you feel, how you identify, what you like to do and what you don’t like to do. Every single human person is created by God and has a human nature. The fact that we all share the same human nature means that good and evil is the same for all of us, and also that we have no power to change what is good and what is evil.
• Recently, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia made headlines by stating that, during his time as head of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Rome, he tried to make changes to move away from what he called “armchair theology” that is grounded in natural law theory and move toward a new paradigm that focuses on the lived experiences of real people in their concrete circumstances.
• What this means is that he was trying to move towards a moral theology where good and evil are different for different human beings. Homosexuality is good for some people, bad for others. Divorce and remarriage is sometimes good, sometimes bad. The use of artificial birth control is sometimes good, sometimes bad.
• Anyone who adopts such a mentality effectively overthrows the entire moral order. If good and evil are different for each person, then there is no good and evil, because each person is able to justify anything he does by just saying that, while it may not be good for others, it is good for him.

• June is the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart.
• The devotion to the Sacred Heart is a devotion to the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ for us, especially His love for us as manifested in the Holy Eucharist.
• This devotion to Our Lord’s physical heart, as a symbol of His love for us, existed during the Middle Ages, but in the 1600s, Our Lord Himself came down on earth to explicitly ask for Catholics to practice this devotion and for this feast to be instituted.
• The timing and place was important. Our Lord appeared in France at a time when the heresy of Jansenism was rampant in the Catholic world. This heresy made the hearts of Catholics cold towards God and so, a few decades after its appearance, Our Lord reminded the world of His great love for us and of our duty to love Him in return.
• If we fast forward to 2026, we find that we as Catholics and even as traditional Catholics very much struggle to love Our Lord as He deserves to be loved. This is why it is important for us to have a devotion to Our Lord’s Sacred Heart. This helps us to love Our Lord.
• We must remember what our catechism teaches us, namely, that we are made to know, love and serve God in this life. We are made to love God. Loving God is to fulfill the very meaning for our existence, to accomplish the purpose for which we exist.
• There are two pieces of knowledge that are very important for us to possess in order for us to love God: one is an understanding of sin and the other is an understanding of God’s love.
• These two things are mentioned in the beautiful Collect of the Mass of the Sacred Heart: “O God, Who in the Heart of Your Son, wounded by our sins, mercifully lavish upon us the infinite riches of love”.
• There are two great truths there: a) our sins wound Our Lord; b) Our Lord lavishes His love on us. Both of these truths are attacked today by two great illusions.
• One is the illusion that our sins do not hurt God. This is one of the reasons why sin is not taken seriously today. People do not worry about sin; they do not worry by saying to themselves, “If I engage in sinful behavior, I will offend God and He will send me to Hell”.
  • This is particularly true of the sin of heresy. Heresy has always been considered to be one of the greatest sins because it is a willful rejection of what God has taught us. Our Lord came on earth, He taught us the truths that we are to believe about Him and which we need to get to Heaven. And the heretic says, “I refuse to believe; I choose not to believe” Offensive!
  • But this is also true with sins against the moral law. Many people have the idea today, including many Catholics, that no matter how you live your life, God is still pleased with you. If you have a homosexual lifestyle, God blesses you; if you divorce and remarry, God blesses you; if you contracept your children, God blesses you.
  • It is a hallmark of love that you seek to avoid anything that might displease the one that you love. But today’s mentality is that nothing that I do can displease God, whether it be in thought, word or deed.
  • This idea is false; it is sinful. Liberalism is a sin.
• The other blind spot we have today is not seeing how much God loves us, only understanding God’s love in a minimalist way.

• Two weeks ago, we celebrated Mothers’ Day in order to honor our physical mothers, who brought us into this world and nourished and took care of us when we were children.
• During the whole of this month of May, we honor our spiritual mother, Mary, Our Lady, who takes care of all our spiritual needs as mediatrix of all the graces we receive.
• With today’s great feast of Pentecost, we honor yet a third mother, we have yet another Mother’s Day in the month of May. The mother we honor today is Holy Mother Church.
• The Church is our mother because she is the bride of Our Lord Jesus Christ and is so united with Christ that we say she is His Mystical Body. They are, as it were, two in one flesh.
• United together, Our Lord and His bride bring forth children unto eternal life. They do this by governing, teaching and sanctifying their children, that is, Catholics. We are born into new life by baptism, we are healed by confession and we are nourished by the Holy Eucharist. Our Mother the Church does all these things for us.
• Today’s feast is like the birthday of our mother the Church. While Our Lord is the head of the Church, the Holy Ghost is her soul. He descended upon the Apostles today and gave them the spiritual gifts they needed to fulfill their priestly functions. The day of Pentecost is the day when they began their mission of going to all nations to baptize people and bring them into the Church. It was the day that the Church came forth and manifested herself to the world.
• We have a duty to love all of our mothers, and Holy Mother Church is no exception. We must be grateful to be Catholics and desire to do our part, in our life, to assist our mother the Church.
• This is all the more true today, when our mother is being attacked. What we are witnessing today has often been compared to Our Lord’s Passion. In past centuries, the Church at times resembled Our Lord in His public life or even His triumph over His enemies. But today, she resembles Our Lord on the Cross, in that she is wounded and being disfigured by her enemies.
• One of the most painful aspects of this passion is that, just as Our Lord was betrayed and abandoned by the Apostles, so too the Church today is being betrayed by the successors of the Apostles. The Church remains the Spotless Bride of Christ in herself, but her external appearance has been disfigured by false teaching and bad liturgies.
• It is like a difficult situation in a family. Consider if the sons of a family started honoring other women as their mother than their actual mother. This would take away from their proper mother the honor due to her. Say they brought those women over their house, gave them presents, and told them they loved them, all in the presence of their own mother.
• This is similar to today’s Popes showing all this respect to false religions: kissing Korans, hosting Pachamama idols, honoring fake Anglican prelates, praying with leaders of all different religions. These things make it seem like these false religions are able to be mothers of souls, as if they can lead souls to Heaven, as if they can do only what the bride of Christ can do.

• In today’s epistle, we have this very astonishing scene where Our Lord is speaking to the Apostles, instructing them. And then, suddenly, Our Lord starts lifting up from the earth and goes up into the heavens until He disappears in the clouds. The way it is described, it almost seems like he is in the middle of speaking to them when this happens. Whereas, the way it is described in Luke, the same author, He gives them a last blessing and then goes up to Heaven.
• The Apostles are not sad about Our Lord going up to Heaven. Rather, St. Luke says that they returned to Jerusalem with great joy.
• But I think that we ourselves want to ask Our Lord questions about what has just happened. We especially want to ask Him, “Lord, why are you leaving us? Why don’t you stay here on earth and be with us and help us? Please stay to cure our sicknesses, cast out our devils, and raise our dead.”
• This is an important question and we are curious to know how Our Lord would answer. We do not have an explicit answer in the Gospels but I do think that we find the answer there, if we look closely, not just one answer, but multiple ones.

• In today’s epistle, St. James tells us that God, “of his own will hath begotten us by the word of truth, that we might be, as it were, the first-fruits of his creatures.”
• In the New Testament, we hear a lot about this idea that our Father in Heaven “begets” us. It is mentioned in every Mass, at the Last Gospel, when we hear: “As many as received him, Our Lord gave them power to be made the sons of God, to them that believe in his name. Who are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
• At the beginning of his first epistle, St. Peter says, “Blessed be the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy has begotten us again, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto a living hope, unto an incorruptible inheritance”.
• But what does this mean when Scripture says that we are begotten by God the Father?

• “Shout with joy to God, all the earth. Sing you a psalm in his name. Give glory to His praise.”
• These words of today’s Introit are inviting us to rejoice in God and not only to praise Him but to give glory to His praise. How are we to do this? By singing.
• As human beings, singing is one of the best means we have to express the joy that is in our hearts and also give solemnity to our rejoicing.
• God has given us the great gift of our human voice and practically everyone around the world uses it at times to sing.
• The human voice is considered to be superior to all musical instruments for a number of reasons
  • Because it is an instrument that is part of our body, we are able to produce many more sounds with it, and especially we are able to form words.
  • Humans respond emotionally more to the sound of the human voice than to any instrument.
  • The human voice alone functions as both a wind and a string instrument at the same time.
• It is for this reason that humans have always made music using their voices, using it to accompany their work, their gatherings, and especially their religious ceremonies.
• And just as the Catholic Church provides us with the greatest act of worship of God, the Holy Mass, so too she provides us with the greatest music to accompany the worship of God.
• The need to compose proper music for the Mass has been so great that the Mass has often been referred to as the foundational pillar of Western music. It was because of the Mass that musical notation was standardized, that polyphonic music was developed, and that musicians had employment over the centuries.
• For a long time, in the history of the Church, all Masses were sung Masses; the Low Mass only came into being in the Middle Ages. St. Paul already speaks about singing in his epistle to the Ephesians, when he invites them to “be filled with the holy Spirit, speaking to yourselves in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual canticles, singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord” (Eph. 5:18-19). This is the epistle for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost.
• The Fathers of the Church spoke of the importance of singing at Mass:
  • St. Augustine explained that we sing at Mass to show our love for God.
  • St. Basil the Great says that our liturgical songs are like a spiritual incense that raises up to God.
  • St. John Chrysostom said these beautiful words: “Every believer is a musical instrument made by God, and at the same time a musician. If the musician (the soul) keeps the instrument (the body) pure and uses it properly, the two together raise to the Creator a hymn of praise that is pleasing to God.”
• The bottom line is that one of the main reasons for which God created the human voice is for singing, and the best possible use of the human voice is singing to God at Mass.