I was an English Major in College, and so the misuse of words is particularly irritating. Take, for example, the overuse of the word “awesome.” Thanks be to God this word is fading from popular usage, but five years ago absolutely everything was described as “awesome.” But of course only One is Awesome — only God and the things of God inspire “awe.” To describe her new shoes or the way he washed the dishes as “awesome”  reduces the sense of authentic awe, and Him who inspires true awe.

   As I say, the misuse of “awesome” is fading, but the misuse of another word is on the ascendant. That word is “incredible.” This adjective is used to describe anything that impresses the speaker. For example, “the performance last night was incredible,” or “she has assembled this incredible staff.” The 2004 animated movie about superheroes with attitude (The Incredibles) didn’t help matters. But what does “incredible” actually mean? It means non-credible — unbelievable. If someone says that my homily was “incredible,” they are saying that it is not believable — they don’t buy a word of it — hardly a compliment!

   I think the overuse of the word “incredible” tells us something. It tells us that “credibility,” belief, is on the wane. People are saying that just about everything is “incredible,” and not by accident. People find many more things “non-credible” today than they did 40 years ago. We don’t believe in our members of Congress, our President, our heads of respected corporations, even our priests and bishops.

  To all this “unbelief,” we Catholics say, Credo. “I believe.” Our faith is not in man or things human, but in God. This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday. I believe in the Passion, Death, and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that God lives, and lives in each of us. Let’s keep a good Lent, insisting that there is still room for belief in the world.

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day. I was not yet two years old when he led the March on Washington in 1963. He had a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” Through travail and suffering, African-Americans have gained a  good measure of civil rights since then, although the scars of slavery and racism do not heal quickly. Dr. King had to pay with his own life, but no longer can an African-American be denied a job or legal justice because of his skin color. There was a time when even a black man’s life was subject to the whim of the white man. But today, thanks be to God, America adheres more closely to its “creed,” that “all men are created equal.”

   But not all men. There is still a class of Americans who, though created equal, do not have the right to live. No serious biologist or geneticist would deny that a distinct life begins at conception. To declare that an individual’s life begins only at birth is not rational or scientific—it is a political definition, not factual. The civil rights struggle of our time is not over skin color, but over age. A whole class of Americans are discriminated against because of their age. They are not yet born, they are too young to enjoy the rights the rest of us do.    

   But unlike the African Americans of the 1950s and 60s, these Americans cannot march on Washington. They cannot defend themselves. So massive numbers of Americans march on their behalf. Since the March for Life began in 1974, almost 5 million have marched from the White House to the Capitol to give voice to the voiceless. The abortion industry and mainstream media does everything they can to suppress these voices. This Saturday, 30,000 people will walk from City Hall in San Francisco down Market Street to Embarcadero Center. Join me this Saturday in the great civil rights struggle of our time (register this weekend on the plaza or during the week in the parish office). Dr. King’s work is not yet done—until all Americans are treated equally under the laws of this great land. God bless America!

Today Holy Mother Church celebrates the Lord’s “Epiphany,” a Greek word that means the “shining forth.” The Star shone forth on the divine child in Bethlehem; Wise Men followed its brilliance to the very Light itself, Jesus Christ. He appeared to be just a helpless baby, but wise men always have known that you can’t judge by appearances alone. They saw more deeply, and they saw the face of God.

       Never has the world been more beguiled by superficial appearances than today. The TV screen began to change our perception of reality in the 1950s, and by 2000 we were spending enormous amounts of time staring at all kinds of flat screens. Almost everything now has a “screen” — not only your TV, but your office phone, your cell phone, your camera (remember when we used to look through a viewfinder rather than at a screen), your car, your computer and every electronic toy or tool. Even books are being reduced to flat screens. How much time do you spend looking at a screen rather than engaging the real world? Don’t get me wrong: screens are quite useful, but we tend to forget that they are only two-dimensional. They seem so real that we easily begin to live inside of them. And in doing so, we too become flat and superficial. Every time I walk out my door I have to fight the urge to check texts or emails on my phone rather than look at the real world and greet real people.

   Six years ago, Business week published a scary cover story by Robert Hof on the fantasy “worlds” of multi-player computer games. In 2006, he wrote that at least 10 million people were living “virtual lives” inside computer games. As of July 2011, there are 1.4 billion registered users of virtual games, half of them between the ages of 10 and 14. How many of us are addicted to computer-generated images that don’t exist beyond pixels on a screen? In the worst cases, these people themselves become “pixilated” — superficial images, ghosts of their real selves.

   The Wise Men followed a star to find a real person, a divine person. Every child, every person, reflects that divine child, whose depth is infinite. Don’t accept less than the real, for less than Jesus’ real presence in the world around you.

This year Christmas and New Year’s Day fall on Sundays, so the Solemnity of the Holy Family (normally the Sunday after Christmas) gets pushed back to Saturday. Most of us will not celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family this year, and we will miss the beautiful readings, prayers and homily (hopefully!) on God’s great gift of the family. So let me reflect with you on what the family means to us and to humanity throughout history.

  Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła) was not given much time with his family. Karol’s only sister died before he was born; he lost his mother when he was 8 and his only brother when he was 12. Karol lived alone with his father in Nazi-occupied Krakow until one day, upon returning from class, he found his father dead. Karol was 21 years old.

    I think Pope John Paul understood God’s gift of the family more than most. He writes that the family’s mission is “to guard, reveal, and communicate love” — real love, God’s love. No one and nothing can bring authentic love to the human community as can the family. To the extent that the family fades from our culture, love will fade from our culture. Almost every social problem today is the consequence of the family’s demise. We have progressively rejected God’s plan for the family, and we are paying the price. Our acceptance of divorce, contraception, promiscuity and, now, same-sex arrangements have progressively disabled the American family. Nothing can replace it. Our social problems, our economic collapse and our individual alienation will only increase as we increasingly ignore the role of the family.

  Here’s the good news: change, yes we can! We can restore what we have lost. For Christians, it means living the life of Jesus, Mary and Joseph as best we can. For non-Christians, it means practicing the human virtues as best we can: fidelity to our spouses, sacrificial love for our children, living an honorable and decent life in the sight of all. We can rebuild the American Family, but it means some real lifestyle changes. Let us call upon Jesus, Mary and Joseph to help us (especially us men) to do just that.

I want to congratulate all of you on transitioning so well into the new Mass prayers. Everyone has shown great “spirit” in learning the new responses. The “new Mass prayers” are really the ancient Mass prayers, but in a new translation that restores their vibrancy and depth. The new translation is a thorough restoration of a great artwork, revealing colors and textures that had been obscured by decades of dirt and dust.

   On December 17 we entered the Second Stage of Advent, our immediate preparation for the Solemnity of Christmas. Now is the time to put up your Christmas tree (if you haven’t already!). You will notice we wait until December 17 to put up our parish Christmas trees and wreathes. Unlike the shopping malls, where they put up Christmas decorations in early October, the Church exercises wise restraint in making only a novena of nine days (December 17-25) to prepare for the great feast. Yes, we think about Christmas for months before it arrives, but psychologically we cannot sustain more than about nine days of immediate preparation. Now is the time to really enter into the Christmas spirit. Hopefully we have not been worn out by

pre-Christmas commercialization and can summon up true Christmas joy in these last nine days of Advent. Jesus is waiting for us, not so much at Walmart or even at our Christmas parties, but most perfectly at the sacred altars of our churches.

Sacred Music expressed the heart of Advent and Christmas. The Parish Music Department has broadened our repertoire this year, incorporating polyphony, Baroque, Classical and Gregorian Chant throughout the Masses. We have seven choirs here at St. Joseph’s—seven choirs of angels and seven cantors. This Christmas they all will be singing to the glory of God. 127 voices in total sing in our Children’s Choir, Bells Choir, Spanish Choir, Chant Choir, Bell Canto Choir, Adult Choir and Youth Choir. Pick your choir and join your voices to theirs this Christmas!

_ Tomorrow is All Hallows Eve (Halloween), and the Day after that is All Hallows itself (All Saints), and the Day after that is All Souls (the Day of the Dead). Where did all these  Festivals come from, and what do they mean to us?

   Halloween, of course, means the eve of All Hallows/All Saints Day, and the feast of All Saints goes back to the year 740 AD in Rome. Liturgically, we will solemnly celebrate “All Hallows Eve” with a Vigil Mass on Tuesday evening at 5:45pm. Isn’t it ironic that a celebration of eternal light and perfect happiness, a celebration of all the saints in heaven, became a celebration of darkness, horror, death, gore, and evil? The modern Festival of “Halloween” indeed celebrates “life after death,” only it focuses on Hell rather than Heaven. We must lend all our energies to reaching Heaven, but never forget the reality of Hell.

   Hell is a very real possibility for any of us, and this I think drives our annual obsession with “Halloween.” The only reason to fear death is the possibility of going to Hell. If we simply ceased to exist after death, or if we all went to heaven, no one would fear death. But if we might possibly endure a form of living death after we expire, then we have good reason to fear death.

   Jesus promises that those who believe in Him will not go to Hell (John 11:26). But what of us who die believing in God, yet still need to expiate our earthly sins? For that, God has given us the gift of Purgatory, where we are given the time and grace to completely cast off our sinful habits. The Bible has many examples of sinners who were forgiven, but still had to expiate their sins, such as King David after he had been forgiven his sin with Bathsheba. We should always pray for the dead, and offer some sacrifices that they may quickly pass through Purgatory. November is an entire month dedicated to prayers and offerings for the holy souls in Purgatory. I encourage you to make an offering in the All Souls envelopes, fill out the back, and return it in the offertory. I always make an offering and write in all the names of my deceased relatives. These names will be kept at the foot of our altar all month. Writing them on the envelope, and making an offering, remind me to pray for them no less than I pray for those of us still living!

This is your new blog post. Click here and start typing, or drag in elements from the top bar.

_ I wish to thank all of you who pledged a gift to our Bishop’s Ministry Appeal last February. Our parish, as you know, is entrusted with the largest single goal in the Diocese ($195,000 this year). As a community we pledged $204,000, thus exceeding our goal. We only have a little less than two months to redeem our pledges for this year, and we have received $180,000 in gifts, only $15,000 short of our goal. I realize that some of us will not be able to redeem our pledges due to circumstances. But if you did pledge and somehow forgot about your pledge (debtors — and are we not all debtors to the Good God? — have notoriously poor memories!), please try to redeem it this month. The Diocese will bill us for the remainder in any case, and we will have to pull that out of our operating budget. The Diocese, like all of us, is a bit stretched, but if all of us stretch just a little bit, we can fund the good works of our Diocese as well as our parish.

   Remarkably, our parish finances have been holding steady in an unsteady economy over these last five years. Our offertory gifting is just about even with years past, at about $26,000 a week. We have cut expenses, though, and so are banking about $90,000 a year from our operations expenses. We are banking another $100,000 or so into our building fund. After liabilities (accounts payable), we have about $700,000 in cash in the bank. I am proud and most grateful to all of our parish for pulling together in a difficult economy. At last month’s Finance Council meeting, Kevin MacEgan, our chairman, expressed confidence and gratitude that our parish is in such a financially stable position. Let us pray that God continues to bless us, and let us bless Him in return with gifts of our own.

   One reason our parish is financially stable is that we have made consistent efforts to practice biblically-based money management over the last ten years. We have adhered to basic principles, such as not spending more than we have, tithing as individuals and as a parish, and putting aside a healthy amount into savings every year. Many are not aware of these simple, biblical principles, that make our finances so much less stressful. Would you like to learn God’s ways of managing your money? Would you like to discover proven methods of paying down your debts? I invite you to one of our “Seven Steps to Becoming Financially Free” Bible studies. The next one begins November 7 — and many thanks to Anthony Butera and Nickie Miranda for leading our studies.

   Today is October 2, the Feast of the Guardian Angels. Because it is Sunday, we will not celebrate the festive Mass for the Angels this year (we will offer the Sunday Mass for the 27th Week in Ordinary Time). Since the Sunday Feast overrides the Guardian Angel Feast this year, I want to reflect on these spiritual beings and their role in our lives.

   Probably most of you remember learning the child’s prayer to our angels: “Angel of God/ My Guardian Dear/ To whom God’s Love commits me here// Ever this Day be at my Side/ to light and guard, to rule and guide.” Our good parents taught us that prayer in the hopes that we would always be mindful of our particular Guardian Angel, and commit ourselves to their guidance and care.

   In our parish, the priests of the “Work of the Holy Angels” (Fr. Wolfgang and Fr. Wagner)  have given several missions. Many of us have consecrated ourselves to our own Guardian Angels, including yours truly. I renew my consecration to my Angel every day, with these words: “Holy Guardian Angel … I thank you with all my heart for your loving care. I commit myself to you, and promise you my love and fidelity.” Promising fidelity to our own Guardian Angel is promising fidelity to God himself, for the Angels can do nothing apart from the will of God. Think often that you have a friend, one who loves you, of unimaginable protective power and with a superhuman capacity to love you. He is never apart from you, and links you with God, for he has his eyes continually on God’s Face, obeying His perfect will in everything. God sends these angels, whose existence is a doctrine of the Catholic Church, to guide us through life. My prayer continues, “I beg of you: protect me against my own weaknesses and the attacks of the wicked spirits.” When you are at the end of your rope, you must think of and call on the loving strength of your own Guardian Angel. If you promise your love and fidelity to him, he will guide you through the most difficult and dark moments. Trust, and pray to, your Guardian Angel.