Your Pentecost Sunday Sermon Notes

Was there a good point made in the Holy Mass you heard to fulfill your Pentecost Sunday obligation?

Let us know.

I spoke about the ongoing role of the sacrament of confirmation in Christian life.

There were a couple things which thoroughly delighted me today and underscored the daft claims of adults that Latin is to hard, that reverent liturgy is too difficult.

First, at end of Mass and before we sang the Veni Sancte Spiritus (for the indulgence), at the intonation of the Regina Caeli, you could hear a bunch of little, and I mean little, kids piping up.

The next delightful thing was my meeting young “Luke” again.  Luke is – nearing maybe 3?… perhaps that’s a little generous, but he’s pushing 28.  Today, Luke wanted to demonstrate his liturgical skills.  Solemnly swinging his bright blue toy binoculars by their neck strap, he put his hand quite properly on his breast, made a correct genuflection – better than most adults – and then, with a nod of his head, incensed me… in the sense of incense, of course.  I was quite impressed while I was incensed.  He’s got it, this one.  And it seems that he will be named after a holy man raised to the altar’s after all, in the wake of the last court battle.

Alas, I didn’t have my phone with its video.  Rats.

So, Fr. Z kudos to Luke, who get’s it.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

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12 Comments

  1. John21 says:

    Father mentioned the Holy Spirit’s role in Creation and how this should move us to respect the dignity of all human life, both of the born and the unborn. Then, some usual points on how the Spirit teaches us what we need to know about Christ and the spiritual life and how we need to pay attention to that more often.

  2. Ed the Roman says:

    The point was made that the Church is necessary, and should be engaged with, because we need what it has and we cannot be what we are called to be if we treat it as a sacramental ATM.

  3. HFL says:

    Fr. Paul Scalia spoke about the dual and seemingly contradictory nature of the Holy Spirit that has been characterized as sober inebriation, in reference to Peter’s denial of drunkenness in the wake of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. He noted that St. Francis de Sales similarly made reference to this paradox of the Holy Spirit as a gentle toughness. The point being that the knowledge and wisdom we receive as gifts of the Holy Spirit may at times make us seem inebriated or gentle, but these same gifts also give us the requisite soberness and toughness to confront sin and to live in accordance with God’s will.

  4. francophile says:

    Latin hard? Tell that to my catholic school who can sing all four of the Marian antiphons by memory, can sing Masses 4,8,11 and 18 at the drop of a hat and sing Credo 3, and complain bitterly when things could be done in Latin but are not. In fairness, it took me three years to get them to this point, but foo to those who say it cannot be done. What is really fun is to walk down the sidewalk of the school and hear 2nd graders reel off Regina Caeli because they “like” to sing it. TO them,its natural.

  5. NonnisiteDomine says:

    Our priest preached about how Catholics cannot take pride in abominations and cannot condone sin or support the corrupting of the symbol of God’s covenant especially during this month. He told us to pray for the fruits of the Holy Spirit that we may have the courage to preach the truth in season and out of season.

  6. grateful says:

    Not to worry, our imaginations of little Fulton did a better job Father.

  7. Prayerful says:

    Fr Richardson as often as does went back to the Old Testament for the precursors of Pentecost. God brought a confusion of languages to proud men who sought to build the tower of Babel to touch heaven where in the Epistle every man could hear the Word in his own language.

  8. Liturgy Lover says:

    My 3 and 2 year old sons have Regina Caeli down pat. The only difficult thing will be re-routing them to Salve Regina after today, as they’ve been singing RC multiple times a day all throughout Easter. Our priest (among many other things) discussed the action of the Holy Spirit in several of the different sacraments, including confession. You’ll be pleased to hear that the importance of sacramental confession is a frequent homiletic topic of his, and he typically offers at least half a dozen confession times during the week.

  9. Philomena Mary says:

    EF, early morning Low Mass.

    Father gave a wonderful homily contrasting the Holy Ghost with the “spirit of the age” and asked us to consider exactly which spirit was guiding all these moves away from Tradition both inside the Church and outside it.

    Very, very strong stuff!

  10. I explained a little about what Pentecost was in the Old Testament: the celebration of the wheat harvest and the giving of the Law on Sinai. Then I linked this, of course, to the Holy Spirit as God’s Law written in our hearts, and the harvest of souls.

    Most of my homily was contrasting the bad news and good news of our time that are all bound up together, as they are for us as Christians: victory is concealed in defeat. So the persecution of Christians is tied to the surprising (and largely unreported) growth of conversions among Muslims. This is why Boko Haram is slaughtering Christians in Africa, for example. I talked about good things happening in our parish, but warned that complacency is deadly. If our children are going to stay Catholic, and grandchildren baptized as Catholic, we’d better wake up and do the work that needs doing — with the help of the Holy Spirit.

  11. Imrahil says:

    The sermon was about the Holy Spirit and the Apostles, rather fittingly. I don’t seem to remember too much of it (I wonder why), but I do remember the line: “We have to build up a civilization, as well as a cathedral.”

    (Yes: I did actually attend the Notre-Dame de Chrétienté wayside Mass for my Pentecost Sunday obligation. Sorry for the undertone.)

  12. Imrahil says:

    The sermon was about the Holy Spirit and the Apostles, rather fittingly. I don’t seem to remember too much of it (I wonder why), but I do remember the line: “We have to build up a civilization, as well as a cathedral.”

    (Yes: I did actually attend the Notre-Dame de Chrétienté wayside Mass for my Pentecost Sunday obligation. Sorry for the undertone.)

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