Opening Remarks
What a good priest you have in Father Wilson. He deserves that. I said to him and the other priests in the rectory the other night that they should wake up every morning and say, “Thank you, God, for making me a priest of the Columbus Diocese.” This is a wonderful diocese and a wonderful parish, and it has been truly a memorable experience for me. I do parish missions all over our country, as you know, and even internationally. And what a memorable moment to be in a place that’s so venerable for my province and the priests of my order—the privilege that we had to help found this beautiful parish and the incredible job that the priests of the Columbus Diocese have done to build it up. I think it was handed off to good hands.
Thank you for being so good to the people. You have a wonderful bishop, as you know, and the other good news is that your new bishop has quadrupled the number of seminarians in this diocese in the last couple of years. You are blessed with some very fine young men coming to serve you. So if you are ever tempted against hope, wake up every morning and say, “Thank you, God, for making me a Catholic in the Diocese of Columbus.” It was a privilege for me to have been born here and baptized in this diocese by a very venerable priest, Father Kessler.
Repent and Believe
We come to the close of the mission this evening, and the theme of the mission has been “Repent and Believe.” This really means to look beyond ourselves, to fix our eyes on the Lord who heals, who saves, who renews. In the passages from Sacred Scripture given for this Mass, we see how the people in the desert, though wounded and weary, found life when they looked in trust upon the sign God gave them, and in the Gospel, how this is fulfilled in Christ lifted up on the cross, revealing a love that enters into our brokenness to redeem it.
This evening, as we gather for this final night of the retreat, we begin to see more clearly that the solution to the struggles we face—both in our own lives and in our culture—has been before us all along. The rebuilding of the Christian family through renewed dedication of each one of us as Christians to prayer and the sacramental life within the Church.
To help us glimpse what this can look like, I would like to share a few reflections, as I promised on Sunday, about what happened to our order when we were sent to the South Pacific island of New Guinea in 1955 by Pope Pius XII—where hearts and relationships began to change when people encountered Christ in the Holy Eucharist and allowed his mercy to shape the way they lived and forgave. What God has done there, he desires to do here: to heal wounds, restore families, and form us into a people who live not by division or resentment, but by the power of his grace.
The Miracle Mission: Papua New Guinea
A Culture of Fear
When our friars arrived in New Guinea, they discovered a pre-Christian culture that had existed in isolation for thousands of years with no contact with the outside world. The early pictures that our priests sent back home to Pennsylvania—the people in the photos looked angry. They weren’t angry. They were scared to death. They were scared of each other. They were scared of us. They had never seen white skin before. They thought we were the spirits of their ancestors come back from the dead.
This is the reason they spoke so many different languages—the fear in the culture created division. Literally, cancel culture. The fear separated them, and that’s the reason they spoke 700 distinct vernacular languages. In our Diocese of Mendi, where I’ll be in just a few short weeks, they speak 80 vernacular languages. In the parish I served, we had 80 villages, two priests, and five dialects of the Kewa language—distinct dialects. Seven hundred distinct languages, another 150 dialects, 850 languages altogether.
One of our early missionaries there used to be asked, “Father, how many of those languages do you speak?” And he would say, “All of them equally well.”
The friars made the effort to learn these very complicated ancient tribal languages in order to communicate with the people. And as they began to learn these languages, they realized why there were so many of them. It was very simple: they didn’t talk to each other. And they didn’t talk to each other because they were afraid of each other. There was a phrase in their culture: “There are enemies, enemies everywhere.” That’s how they developed all these different languages and dialects. It was through fear.
Why was there fear? Because of their religious tradition. Their religions were what are called nature-based or animist religions. They were the same as our Native American Indians, the same as native tribes all over the world. In these religions, they have what I mentioned yesterday: servile fear of the supernatural. They certainly had a sense that there was something on the other side. But from what they could intuit through experience—the weather, and the projecting of human brokenness onto the supernatural—they expected that the spirits were not friendly. Saint Paul the Apostle, your patron, famously said that the gods of the pagans are demons.
Their rituals had to do with appeasing these demons, manipulating them, tricking them into doing something for you. The people in my principal outstation told me that in the old days, when they would go off into the forest, they would invent another language so that the spirits wouldn’t understand them. They lived in fear of the supernatural, and that religious fear translated into fear of each other—human projections onto the supernatural and onto one another—leading to cultural violence and tribalism.
Some people say to me, “Well, Father, this is America. We don’t have tribes in America.” I would suggest to you: yes, indeed we do, and we call them Democrats and Republicans. And they’re starting to talk in dialects the other side can’t even understand anymore. You see how language evolves. You use a word like “family values”—it means one thing to a group of people and another thing to a whole other group. Same word, different dialect. That’s how it happens. As Cardinal Sarah says: division because of a loss of common vision, common values. Common sense, by the way, is lost when you lose common values. So it becomes tribal, and then ultimately, in the end, always violent.
No Word for Forgiveness
There was tribal killing, and then retribution because of that. And as the friars were learning these old languages, they noticed another problem: none of them had a word for forgiveness. Seven hundred vernacular languages, 150 dialects—not one of them had a word for it. Because the concept does not exist in the natural law. It certainly doesn’t exist in natural instinct. Pope Francis and even Pope Leo famously liked to quote this old phrase: “God always forgives. Man sometimes forgives. Nature never forgives.”
Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches that the word does not exist in the natural law. The concept doesn’t exist there. So the friars were at a bit of a loss. They tried to explain the idea of forgiveness. The people were simple—not dumb; very intelligent, actually. They listened, shaking their heads. Interesting concept. Why would you do that? What do you get out of that? Someone hurts you, you write it off? What’s the benefit? Explain. What do you get out of that? Now that’s a real question. If you don’t have an answer for that question in the bush in 1955, pack your bag and go back to Pittsburgh.
The Child of Peace
They were looking around the culture to find some way to help the people. And as Saint Patrick, by legend, held up a three-leaf clover in front of the pagan Celts to describe the concept of the Blessed Trinity, by God’s providence, they found something. It was a custom that was very costly in their culture, very precious. If they did this particular ritual, the two tribes that did it would never, ever fight again. It was a form of exchange.
They would only do it because it was costly—usually in the case of someone being killed, something of ultimate consequence. They would say, “We killed somebody from your tribe. That was an injustice. We took a person from you. We’ll give you a person from our tribe. We’ll replace the life.” It was compensation. They all had words for payoff, payback, retribution, compensation. But it wasn’t an adult, because an adult would have a memory, harbor resentment, would not live peacefully in an enemy tribe. It was a child—a newborn infant.
The concept is very visceral. The idea is: we are literally handing you our flesh and blood. In this infant, this newborn, this tabula rasa, this fresh beginning—this child will intermarry with you, and because of that, our flesh and blood are going to be mixed. So if we ever fight again, we’ll be spilling our own blood. And if they did that ritual, those two tribes would absolutely never fight again. The child was called the “child of peace.”
You can see where this is going. The missionaries explained that God sent his own Son into our tribe in that way—as a newborn, flesh and blood. And in the Holy Mass, in the Eucharist, it is now his flesh and blood mixed with ours. And so we know a couple of things: he is with us now. He’s in our tribe. He’s there in that beautiful tabernacle until the end of time. And we know he’s not going to hurt us, because we have his Son.
And then his Son grew up, and he explained to us clearly what’s on the other side and what the nature of the one God is. He used a word that changed the world in the Aramaic language: Abba. Father. A loving Father—not wicked or cruel, but one who loved us so much that he gave us his Son, his own flesh.
Love Converted New Guinea
That was the beginning. Then the issue was marriage, because they were polygamists. Their form of polygamy was that young girls—maybe 13, 14, sometimes younger—were purchased by men normally twice their age, and they were property. They didn’t live with their husbands. The men all lived together in a big longhouse in the center of the village. Boys stayed with their mothers until they were weaned, then went to live with the men. Girls stayed with their mothers until they were 12 or 13 and were sold off, and it would start all over again.
When they heard from our missionaries that Catholic marriage was: you get to marry somebody you choose because you love them—somebody who could even be roughly your own age—the young people in Papua New Guinea said, “Tell us more about that.” You could say, in a way, it was love that converted New Guinea.
Marriage, Family, and the Rebuilding of Culture
What is the primary social institution currently under attack in our culture? It’s marriage—because it gives birth to all the rest. There would be no priests if it weren’t for your sacrament. I tell people on parish missions: if you think there’s a crisis in the priesthood—meaning not enough priests—that’s your fault, not ours. We don’t have kids. We are your children. We are your sons. We produce our clergy from your families. And as the family diminishes, so does the Church—literally.
I’m so delighted that you’re getting the Confraternity restarted here at Saint Paul’s. I work with these beautiful families—many of them with multiple children, big homeschool families. Most of our vocations have always come from these big families. When you have one or two children, you’re thinking, “Who’s going to take care of me when I get older?” Vocations came from larger families. What has happened is that as the family has been diminished in the culture, that demographic has decreased. We still draw vocations from the same demographic—working-class, blue-collar families, normally multi-sibling families. It’s just that the demographic in the country has decreased.
The famous prophetic voice of Charlie Kirk, and even the great kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, Harrison Butker, gave his famous speech at Benedictine College a few years ago. What was the conclusion of all their speeches about how to save our culture? Get married. Have kids. It’s really that simple.
I have some dear friends in the Steubenville area who have eight children. The wife, Teresa, was telling me years ago when they had just had their eighth child: “Father, I have to have a new baby every once in a while because I bring them home from the hospital and I don’t see them until they’re teenagers because my daughters don’t have doll babies.” They change the diapers. They get up at night. You have more than four children, you have hired employees.
I was preaching at a parish mission in Richmond, Virginia, a couple of years ago. In that parish, there’s a family with 21 children. Two sets of twins. Same mom and dad. The father is of Sicilian descent, and I said to him, “How do you manage that?” He said, “I try to remember their names.” I said, “Thanks for saving the planet.”
The beautiful thing about these wonderful families is that when you have large families, children instinctively learn how to be selfless. Your siblings will call you out of your selfishness, your narcissism—the sickness of our culture—faster than your parents ever could. They are much closer to you. They keep you honest. You can be from a large family and be selfish. It’s a lot harder. Children from larger families tend to be more emotionally stable, more spiritually and emotionally mature faster, because they know how to live in community, work with other people, do impulse control, and anticipate the needs of others.
As the family goes, the society goes. But it starts with the individuals. It starts with the mom and dad. If you were here last night, I had to say some challenging things, because if we’re going to correct the sickness in this culture, we have to be honest. From 30 years of practice as a priest with married couples: we have to start preparing again for Christian marriage as Christians, not as pagans. You lay the foundation as individual Christians, faithful Christians, preparing for Christian marriage. That’s how you get Christian families.
The old policy of the preachers is: a lion in the pulpit, a lamb in the confessional. You’re always merciful to people for their weaknesses and brokenness. But what is not working—I would say this: there’s not a priest I know who enjoys holding legalism over anybody’s head. If cohabitation prior to marriage worked, it would at least be interesting. It would still be a moral issue, but if it made for happier, more stable couples, I would even say it’d be interesting. It doesn’t work. We’ve tried it for a couple of generations. It makes relationships more fragile, not more stable. Statistically, it’s the highest percentage of people that get divorced.
The cultural gospel says: just live your life for you. You be your truth. You decide what morality is. Forget about what Jesus said about love, about self-control. Saint Augustine said in the fourth century, “Conquer yourself. The world is at your feet.” Padre Pio used to say, “Our greatest struggle in life is with ourselves—conquering our impulses.” That’s the path to liberation.
As the individual Christian, through a commitment to live as Christians individually, then as couples, then as families—that is how you rebuild the foundation of a healthy society, of a selfless and truly loving culture. That’s where love is really found, even though it takes a little bit more effort. Without that effort, we get to where we are: the chaos of division, hatred, violence, and political dialogue where if you believe something I don’t believe, you’re not just wrong—you’re the enemy. We go back to the bush.
Forgiveness
I’d like to say a few last words about forgiveness, because it’s so important in rebuilding the Christian family. Imagine trying to navigate any relationship in your life—any relationship, let alone a marriage—without even the concept of forgiveness. You get offended, you get hurt, you get wounded. Somebody hurts you, and you can take your pound of flesh, you can get paid off, but what you can’t do—what is not in your bag of tools—is to forgive. Imagine trying to navigate any relationship without the concept of forgiveness. Now, it’s hard. But imagine life without it. That was their life for thousands of years.
When that became clear to them, I will tell you, that was the end of cannibalism. It was the end of polygamous marriages. It was the end of tribalism. You go to Papua New Guinea today, you get off the airplane, you see nothing but smiles. They still have sin—by the way, we didn’t take original sin to New Guinea; it was already there. But there’s no one on that island who wants to go back to cannibalism or polygamous marriages.
Our friars called that the “Miracle Mission” because we couldn’t keep up with them. Thousands and thousands of people. It shocked our early priests how quickly and how desperately eager the people were for us to come and tell this story, because it was so healing. It was a light-year leap from the fear and oppression they had experienced for thousands of years. It was a true liberation.
Sometimes we misunderstand forgiveness. We feel like if I forgive this person who hurt me, they’re just getting away with it. There’s a little native down deep in all of us. Let me tell you what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not approving of somebody’s crime or sin or even minimizing it. In psychological terms, you might call that denial or codependency. That’s not forgiveness.
There’s an old saying that describes it well: when we fail to forgive, it’s like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die. It is truly toxic. In many ways, forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves. That’s not why we do it, but the fruit of it is liberation.
If you’re worried that God is not just—that people are going to get away with their crime, their sin, their wickedness—let me clarify. He is just. Ultimately, people pay for their sins either in this life or the next. You don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to be the judge. They’ll have a judge. But you also don’t have to take their punishment on you. The person did the crime, the person hurt you—and you say, “Well, somebody’s got to stand up for this injustice. If nobody else does, I have to.” And so you end up taking their punishment for their crime. It’s crazy, but we do it.
A spouse who did something wrong hurt their spouse, and the other spouse feels like the only way they’ll ever be whole is to daily remind them of it for the rest of their life: “I will constantly remind them of their failure.” Who suffers there? It’s crazy, but we do it. There is a little native in all of us. Forgiveness is absolutely a liberation.
The Martyrs of Auschwitz
During World War II, the Nazis didn’t just kill Jewish prisoners in those camps. They executed about 6,000 Catholic priests and religious, and they killed a group of Capuchins from my order—Polish Capuchins—at Auschwitz. Pope Saint John Paul II canonized this group. Our order refers to them as the Martyrs of Auschwitz.
Some of these Polish Capuchins managed to survive in the camp until the end of the war when the Russian soldiers came and liberated Auschwitz. Our former superior, my novice master, Father Robert McCreary, was in school with some of them in Rome about 15 years later. They shared with him what happened to them. The Nazi scientist Josef Mengele was in the camp and was using them and other prisoners for medical experiments. What he was doing to them could only be described as the most heinous, ghastly torture you could imagine. They had to go through this every day.
Father McCreary asked them, “How are you people alive, let alone sane?” They said: while they were there, one of the Nazi guards—a fallen-away Catholic who knew they were priests—would secretly smuggle to them a thimble full of wine and a little piece of bread every morning. From memory, they would celebrate Holy Mass. No beautiful altar, no vestments, no books—just from their memories.
They said, “We clung to the Eucharist, because we knew that if we gave in to the righteous anger over what was being done to us—if we kept talking about it, if we kept thinking of it—they wouldn’t just have our bodies. They would have our souls. We clung to the Eucharist.” They even prayed for the Nazis. They said, “We maintained our dignity—our human dignity—because we maintained our spiritual dignity.” And they were liberated long before those Russian soldiers ever opened the gates of Auschwitz.
The power of the sacraments when the tire hits the road. Viktor Frankl, the famous psychiatrist—he was in Auschwitz—watched the victims come into the camp. He said: people who came in who had nothing to hope for, they died within days. People who came in who had something to hope for, they survived. The power of faith, the power of the sacraments, when the tire hits the road.
Forgiving Ourselves: Guilt and Wounded Affect
A lot of times people have a difficult time forgiving themselves for their past sins. We have to make a distinction between guilt and feelings of guilt. When you commit a sin, you are justly condemned. When you go to confession, the punishment is removed. The guilt is removed. What lingers is not guilt, but wounded affect.
You can do a couple of things with that. You can go to the extreme of presumption: “I’ll just do whatever I want. I’m such a wretch, I might as well sin with abandon.” That’s presuming on the mercy of God. Or you can go to the other extreme—despair: “God, I’m so pathetic. God could never forgive me. God could never love me.” Avoid the extremes. Padre Pio used to say: “My past, O Lord, to your mercy. My future, to your providence. That I might live in the present with gratitude for your love and mercy.”
It’s in the healing of the sacrament of confession that we find that mercy. The way wounded affect is healed is through grace. Grace comes to us in two forms: sanctifying grace and actual grace. Actual grace helps us do the good and avoid the evil. Sanctifying grace is deeper healing, restoring. We get actual grace when we pray—a recommitment to the prayer life. And the spiritual and corporal works of mercy provide actual grace. They strengthen us to do the good and avoid the evil.
The Eucharist: The Medicine That Heals
Remember what I said yesterday: you don’t feel yourself into a new way of acting. You act yourself into a new way of feeling. Acta non verba. The spiritual and corporal works of mercy, and then most profoundly, the sacraments—from which we get both sanctifying grace and actual grace. Sanctifying grace is that deeper cleansing, healing, purifying. Our Lord knew we would need this, and he provides all of it. Which is just why it’s inexplicable that so many people avoid the very medicine that would heal their souls, heal their families, heal their hearts, heal our culture, our world.
This was the observation of Saint Francis: that our Lord would allow himself to be present in our hands—in our pathetic human hands at times—and to remain with us in this humble way. He even allows us to be bored with him. Some people say about Mass, “I don’t get anything out of Mass.” I would say: you get Jesus out of Mass. People say, “Well, it’s boring.” No—you’re boring. What happens on that altar is the most exciting thing on this earth.
He allows himself to be subject to us in that tabernacle—to become bored with him, distracted, dismissive, and even to offer him disbelief and sacrilege—even though he gives us miracles and constant reminders of his miraculous presence. He makes himself subject to us because he loves us. He wants to heal us.
Forgiveness and Reconciliation
Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons, a psychiatrist and professor from Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, wrote a beautiful book for his colleagues called Helping Clients Forgive. He makes a distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation. Reconciliation is not always possible. Sometimes the person who hurt us is dead. Sometimes the person who hurt us is psychologically not intact. Sometimes the person who hurt us is very emotionally wounded themselves. There’s a saying in psychology: “Hurt people hurt people.”
But forgiveness we can always do. Because, he says, the people we fail to forgive become our masters. We give people the power that only God is rightly owed. We give that to a person who wounds us, and then we live in submission to them. Doesn’t make any sense, but we do it.
Christ’s Sermon from the Cross
When our Lord was hanging on the cross and they were mocking him, his restraint was also related to us. Archbishop Sheen famously said that our Lord preached his greatest sermon from the cross. I would suggest to you that sermon has two points.
First, it is not a teaching but a demonstration of the virtue he said would be among those who inherit the earth: the virtue of meekness. That is power held in reserve for the sake of another. In his case, divine meekness. Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Son of God—there he is on the cross. They beat him. Now they’re taunting him: “If you’re really the Son of God, come off that cross.” With a flip of his finger, he could have destroyed them, and they richly deserved it. But you know what? So do we. Because if we’ve committed even a single mortal sin, we don’t deserve heaven. We deserve hell. The only way that doesn’t happen is because of what happened on the cross.
So the first action of forgiveness is an act of the will. He taught it by his example: I’m not going to do to you what you did to me. And then the second thing: he looked up to the Father and said, “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” He prayed for us, and he taught us to pray for those who hurt us.
If you’ve done that—if you haven’t tried to return in kind the evil done to you, and you pray for the person who hurt you—you’ve forgiven. You have forgiven.
And sometimes the issue is that we can’t forget. Saint Peter approached our Lord in Matthew’s Gospel with this question: “My Lord, if my brother sins against me, how many times should I forgive him? Seven times?” He said, “No—seventy times seven.” An infinite number. Saint Peter thought he was being generous, because in the Old Testament it says the just man sins seven times a day. But our Lord said: not just in terms of number, but in terms of gravity. Not just venial sins, but mortal sins—all sins. And when we do this, it gets easier. It doesn’t get harder.
In our minds, the person might have hurt us once. You might think about it a thousand times. Every time the devil provokes you to that, you just say, “Jesus, your mercy.” And the more you get into the habit of doing that, the easier it becomes.
There is a way to healing. There is a way to wholeness. It is through the Most Holy Eucharist. It is through the gift of the sacraments—because we worship a God who knows how to rise from the dead. Saint Paul the Apostle, pray for us.
Apostolic Blessing
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
Our help is in the name of the Lord. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May he show his face to you and be gracious to you. May he turn his countenance towards you and give you his peace and his blessing. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Transcript prepared from auto-generated captions. Lightly edited for clarity and readability.