This is another new sermon from Fr. Voigt, delivered two months after padrepio
posted this thread, but it's the same priest and the same great stuff, so I'm
posting in this same great thread by the great helper, padrepio to whom I defer!
www. in this sign you shall conquer. com -[remove the spaces, etc.]
Donations: Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church
1730 N. Stillwell Road, Boston, KY 40107 USA
Sermon given on Palm Sunday, 2013
Fr. Richard Voigt
March 24th, A.D. 2013
From Mass in an undisclosed location
‘Sixth Sword to Pierce Our Lady’
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?rdpbbdznx3eowgy
Duration 12:19
Fr. Voigt: We have now entered into the Passiontide. The Passiontide as you see changes the script; you no longer see the saints exposed before you; you no longer see the crucifix; you see that there is something changing within the Church; there is a hiding—that God, now, controls the situation.
Take for a moment, the action of Our Blessed Mother after the crucifixion of Our Lord. Joseph of Arimethea and Nichodemus go up and they ask for the body of Our Lord Jesus Christ. They receive permission to take the body down. Now, the first thing is, we have Michelangelo seeing Our Blessed Mother with the body of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and then presenting us with the Pieta. The Pieta symbolizes the powerlessness of God, self-inflicted – the self-inflicted powerlessness of God in the hands of men. God Who created us, hands Himself over to us: the Pieta.
Two times in Our Blessed Mother’s life was this exposed: First, at the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ when He is nothing more than a small, little baby; and she encloses Him in swaddling clothes, she binds His arms, and she cares for Him, helpless, powerless. And here, at the situation of the Pieta, with the arms that she held that baby she now holds her dying, or her dead son. And this tells us something about God, that in relationship with us, God enters into a passivity.
Now, think about this! We have a great problem today, because we say, “WHICH MASS pleases Almighty God!?” We say, “Is it a valid Mass!? Is it a legitimate Mass!?”
Father [Hector] Bolduc, when he was studying for the priesthood, at Catholic U, said that they learned that one of their professors was giving over the Blessed Sacrament for a satanic Mass. That satanic Mass is VALID. Imagine! God, in His passivity, giving over Himself into the hands of those who adore satan! For them to sacrilegiously bring about this crucifixion of Our Lord’s body in the Blessed Sacrament—The devil believes more than we believe! – that the real presence is here!
Why! In this world we see and recognize, by the absence, the powerlessness of God in our hands! We see the passivity of God in our hands. This holy Mass that we are coming to now, in Passiontide, we come before Almighty God, and WE are the ones who call Him down, ask Him to be again present with us in this most holy sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.
And so, what takes place when we bring all things together in this mystical moment called the Mass? It is a divine choice. God gives to us Himself and he says, “Do with Me what you please.”
“Do with Me what you please.” Now, we can either go one way or the other. If we go the route that is that which brings us, and elevates us into the divine, well, we would say that we will ‘become powerless ourself’ – we will give to you, Our Lord Jesus Christ, all that we are, all that we can become, all that we do: everything, from the littlest thing to the greatest thing – it’s all Yours! In that case, love brings about the perfection of the soul.
The other is this: You give me the power, you give me the authority, I want to be a dictator! I want to use people for what I want to get from them! I want to make them my slaves! I want to be a tyrant! I’ll take pleasure in torturing, destroying!
Our world today has great amounts of power. We can destroy entire cities with one simple Neutron bomb. We have the power. And now, we have a situation in which we say, “this power is coming to a peak.” It’s going to come to a peak in which either man will destroy man, or man will come to contemplation. Because the Pieta either leads us to realizing, God Himself was destroyed by us, what can we expect!? If we have destroyed the Son of God, then the Son of God says, My Father will send his armies, His legions of angels and destroy you!
But instead, the powerlessness of God gives us the moral situation that we are in today. It’s a moral situation because we have to choose either to love or to hate. God gives us the freedom to love. And in that freedom, all personalities will blossom forth into His self; we become one with Him. If we follow the pattern of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and we follow the pattern of the sorrows of Our Blessed Mother, we will yield all that we are, realizing that “I am people of nothing,” as St. Thomas said, “except evil.” But if I get into myself and I realize the pride, realize the greed, realize the lust, realize that sinfulness of my human nature, fallen, but not destroyed, then I can give over to Almighty God what He asks of me: humility! Confession of my nothingness—and then, He says, “Now, you’re ready for the power that is like My power!” What will we be ready for? Powerlessness, yielding ourselves over.
Today, a certain Persian king by the name of Sappor, had an individual that was his second in command. He was a Catholic. When he was found out to be Catholic, the king said, “You are to be beheaded, unless you apostasize, renounce Christ!” He started enduring his sufferings, and then he says, “I can’t take it anymore – I renounce Christ!” He renounced Christ. His bishop, who knew him well, and loved him, was very disappointed. Bishop Simeon. And in Persia, this man then became second in charge again! They captured the bishop, and the bishop came walking into that place of a dungeon, and he saw, and passed there was Eusazades, and he looked at him, and he saw and went up to him, and the bishop just turned his head, and turned it, disgusted. The man was flabbergasted. He fell on the ground, he began to cry out: What have I done? What have I done? Denied Christ – I am a criminal! I denied the one who has given me everything – for what? To be second in command!? To have all that I want in this world!? So he ran to Sappor. He said, “Sappor, you must do me a favor! You must renounce me before everyone for what I am, a criminal.”
“What have you stolen? What have you done?”
“I denied the one who has given me my life. I denied the one who has given me the direction of my eternal life. And I chose to serve you, as I have always chose to serve you – so I ask you ONE THING, Sappor, go forth into this kingdom of yours and tell them: Eusazades is being crucified, is being killed because he professed Faith, not because he was not a loyal servant. He was a loyal servant to me and faithful all the way, but he professed the Faith in Jesus Christ, therefore, he must die! Well, that is exactly what the counselor wanted, because he wanted the people that he had scandalized before to realize he had repented. He became a nothing in order that he might receive the power to save souls.
Take another example, in Russia. They’re called the Herogeevee. The Herogreevie [sp?] make a vow. “If we allow others,” they say, “in this Communist Goulag to endure suffering, they will increase hatred in this world for their Communist dictators. We will take their suffering, and our act of reparation, expiation, will increase love in this world, and hence, we will increase God in the world. So they go about, taking the punishment of others, in order that they might increase the love of Almighty God in this world.
Powerlessness of Christ in the arms of Our Blessed Mother. The powerlessness is what God gives to us that we might have power! Because as soon as I release everything, then I have the power to gain everything that God wishes to give to me.
It is the mystery of the sixth sword that
pierces our Blessed Mother’s heart.
It is now the age of power—the age in which we can destroy, or the age in which we can contemplate. Because once we realize that this world has given us and offered us everything that is possible, we find out, it comes up short! And what matters to us most is that our heart rest in God. And so we are the people that can enter into contemplation easier than any other time, because we have had it all, and we have found out, it’s trash! And now, what makes the sense for us? It is possessing and holding the powerless Christ in our hands.
That is what we’re called to do today. Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospel, says to the individuals: “Sitit,” [si quis sitit veniat ad me et bibat (Jn. vii. 37; cf. Is. lv. 1)] “if you thirst, come to me, come to me all you who are thirsty, and I will give you drink; I will refresh” [Jer. xxxi. 14, 25; Mt. xi. 28]. We must come to Him, He Who has nothing in His heart but love for us, we come to Him as Our Blessed Mother came to Him, and we say, “Fiat! Thy will be done!”
And so, the powerlessness of Our Lord, Jesus Christ, the powerlessness of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ brings about the power to forgive, and the power to save.
Let us ask Almighty God this day as we begin the first day of Passiontide, to give us a passionate love for Almighty God, for all that He has done, and all that He continues to do for each and every one of us.
May Almighty God bless you, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
This is the second of three parts, all given on Palm Sunday.
Now, the priests I know gave NO sermon on Palm Sunday because they read the
St. Matthew Passion in Latin. So here is Fr. Voigt, not only giving a sermon, but
giving it in THREE PARTS, and they are all very good, on a Sunday when most
priests take the day OFF from sermons. Is there an explanation for this???
www. in this sign you shall conquer. com [remove the spaces]
Donations: Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church
1730 N. Stillwell Road, Boston, KY 40107 USA
Sermon given on Palm Sunday, 2013, Part ii of iii (?)
Fr. Richard Voigt
March 24th, A.D. 2013
From Mass in an undisclosed location
‘SEVENTH Sword to Pierce Our Lady’
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?g7r77l1dbwaem4b
Duration 19:44
Fr. Voigt: Theologians fail to write about it; priests fail to talk about it; but we are living in an age of the demonic. Because we live in the age of the demonic, the ones that speak about it and write about it are the library people, the poets, the literature men.
E. Stoddard Kennedy writes about this age, and he begins with these words:
The hour is at hand, when some dark beast crouches at Bethlehem to be born. The good lack all conviction. The worst are full of passionate intensity.
We come to the final act of Our Blessed Mother’s Seven Sorrows, the act in which Our Lord is placed within the sepulcher. We’ve gone through six weeks, meditating upon Our Lady and the Sorrows that she has endured, in union with the sufferings her Son endures.
In the first week we went through this question of growing in the freedom from fear. That every one of us realizes to the extent that fear captures us, we do nothing, but when we have the fear that is reverence of Almighty God and trust in Almighty God, we can then, like Mary proceed in haste.
The second week – it was the question of the Flight to Egypt. Each and every one of us will enter into this flight, it is the flight from the tyranny of things, to be free from any attachment from the things of this world, so that my heart is free to be attached to the one and only person who matters most in this world, and that is Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Then we moved into the third week. The third week we began to reflect upon Jesus in the temple, abandonment. That abandonment taught us a great truth: we are not to possess persons, just as we are not to possess things. That this is a difficult thing for you and I as we grow as adults, especially if we are mothers and fathers. Because Almighty God gives us people, children, as a trust, not as a possession. And so, freedom from the sense of possession – I have to know everything, I have to do everything, I have to guide my child’s life right to the last moment! Our Lady and St. Joseph learned, the child must be about the vocation of the Father in heaven. God has called each one of us for a purpose in this world. If we deny this, we are atheists – because Almighty God has His hand; He’s guiding each and every one. The moment we start manipulating and try to train these things, ‘gotta have it my way!’ – the ego, the pride, everything else starts to erupt in our life and destroys the spiritual life.
The fourth week—the fourth week was the question of Pity. The conquering, being free from self-pity, from sentimental piety. Our Lord Jesus Christ places Our Blessed Mother in the situation where all she can do is look at him, the Fourth Station [of the Cross]. Her eyes are the mirror of her soul; His eyes are the mirror of His soul. And so, when she peers into the soul of Our Lord Jesus Christ, she is peering right into her own soul as well! And this is a pity that is not self-pity, but rather divine pity. Gerrard Vaughan writes an entire book on the divine pity, coming to realize that we are to be set free, in silence. We see the contrast between the women of Jerusalem having wept and cried and mourned over Our Lord Jesus Christ, having some consolation, but in Our Lady, there is no consolation, it is simply union: her pity encourages His vocation! And that is why she is there, all the way to the end of the Cross, because it is the Cross that will be the key to unlocking the spiritual life of every soul that is going to be set free for heaven!
The fifth week—freedom from depression! In the Fifth, Our Lord looks down upon His mother and says, “Woman, behold thy son.” He reaches back into Genesis, and says, now we have the second Eve. The first Eve was disobedient – the second Eve is obedient, completely. The first Eve gave and deceived, the second Eve opens up and illuminates to us the pathway that leads into deepest union with her Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Hence, there is no time for depression, for sadness over the death of Our Lord, He says, now you must take on the Mystical Body! – all of us, as her children! And hence, she doesn’t have time to get depressed; she has to move on; she has to come and bring this mystical body in and through the same thing that her Son endured, in order that your soul and my soul may be purified in and through her love for us.
The sixth week – was freedom from the abuse of power! – the abuse of power. So Our Lord Jesus Christ is now taken down: what do we see in Him being presented to Our Lady in the Pieta image? The powerlessness of God! Giving us everything, He became a dulos [Greek?], a slave for us – He died, determined to bring us to the realization that God loves us so much that He gives His infinite Son, that our souls may be purified in and through that blood that was shed on Calvary.
And so, freedom from the abuse of power. Thinking that my security, what I have done, is something that somehow or other should be rewarded by Almighty God. We must come to the realization that we come to God naked, we come to God dispossessed, we come to God completely free of the ego, in order that we might find Him. Tonight we heard the Gospel that says very clearly, “This woman has thrown out three hundred days’ denari! Judas Iscariot—he knew the price of that ointment!
Oscar Wilde says, “This is the critic! The cynic! The cynic knows the price of everything!” He’ll tell ya’: It cost so much to do this! It cost so much to do that! He’s got the price of everything—he knows the VALUE of NOTHING! Because, what do we mean when we begin to realize this is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ, who can give more than this that we receive on this altar? The body, blood, soul and divinity of God, the One Who created me is the One I receive. And he puts Himself into my power, into our power, and so we move from that dispossessed type of mentality, to know and understand what God was asking of us in our own vocation.
[The seventh week]
And we finally come to this moment now, the final act of Our Blessed Mother in this world, the final Sorrow, the burial of Our Lord in the tomb, and the burial presents us with the key: the freedom from the various forms of egoism. It is the ultimate, because the last thing that we want to give up is our will, and it is just that that must be given up in order that we might do the divine will.
It is the toughest thing; the littlest baby has the toughest little will that you can imagine! When that little baby wants something, (cry – growl – cry), that will is at WORK, from the very beginning when we’re young! And it takes us time, for some not as long as others, as we study St. Dominic Savio, we see Dominic Savio conquering his will at an early age; so that by the age of 15, God says, “Thou art ready to come into the kingdom of heaven.” We live so long, we want to live more and more, whereas the reality, we ought to be saying, I want to get out of this world, stop the sinning, and become united with Almighty God and enjoy the presence, the vision of God for eternity. I want eternity over my temporality!
This what the saints, the Little Flower, 24 years of age, Dominic Savio, 15 years of age, and others, we have martyrs, down at the age of 6 and 7, and they gave up their lives because they knew that what is most important is to kill the ego and attain the divine personality of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
So, what does it for us? It is Baptism! Baptism initiates what St. Paul calls the Soon [sp?] Theology. Soon in Greek means “with.” I die with Jesus in Baptism, in order that I might rise with Jesus in the Kingdom of heaven. I suffer with Jesus in this world, in order that I might find the pattern that leads me to conquering my own self in this world, and be united with Him for all eternity. This soon theology filtrates throughout the Gospel, throughout the works of St. Paul, the Apostle, that we must realize, that as the Mystical Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ, everything that He has done, we will do with Him!
Our Mary, Our Blessed Mother, is what we call “Co-Redemptrix,” Co-Mediatrix – this is soon theology; she redeems with Christ; she suffers with Christ. We must come to this union that gives us the fulfillment of our baptism. Baptism is only for us, a potential, a possible. I have been baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Now, will I allow this seed to be developed throughout my life? What develops it most? It is the humility to confess that I am dirt, nothing, sinful; and through that, I begin to realize what God has done for me, no one in this world would ever have done. It is why we say that Don Bosco’s system says, two pillars: First Pillar, Confession; Second Pillar, Communion. Because if I’m going to Communion without uniting myself with the sufferings of Christ and the blood that conquers the evil in me, well, then I will find that I have read the wrong work – I should have been reading I Corinthians xi., verses 26 and following: Why are you sick? Because you are not giving over to God what He has asked of you.
Why are then, are you dying? Because you are taking the Communion with Christ without purifying thyself. And so the baptism unites us with this soon theology, we begin to realize that everything that Christ has given to us must be taken advantage of while we are in this world. The more we take advantage of the sacraments, the more the divine grace builds in us! That’s what I’m trying to teach the little Kevin, the more the actual grace is participating in your life, the more you increase in the life of Jesus! Right? And that’s what’s important! Because by the end of our life we have to be MATCHING Our Lord. Otherwise, Purgatory, if we’re only halfway open. So we’ve got to come to that matching, so that I may say, like St. Paul: “I live no longer I, but rather Christ lives in me.” The fulfillment of the baptism, the fulfillment of soon theology.
There is a poet, not poet, Francis Thompson, many of you know; he is very famous for that very beautiful poem called “The Hound of Heaven.” And there is one line that continues to remind me of that poem, and to remind me of what is taking place in peoples’ lives.
The verse is this:
Naught shelters thee who will not shelter me.
Nothing! Nothing in this world because you can’t hide from God! Nothing will shelter you, until you give shelter to Almighty God within your hearts. And that is why Holy Week brings us to this great expression of Our Blessed Mother’s Sorrow, that she who has sheltered Him, now places Him into a tomb. The tomb represents the womb of this world. You and I are living in the womb of this world. This womb may give us eternal life or eternal death, all dependent upon the will that is within my being.
This will that is united with the divine will because I have crucified myself with Christ, that allows me to act as Our Lord Jesus Christ, to look and see all things from the vision of eternity, which is the vision of true wisdom.
And so, the final motion of Our Blessed Mother, is to call us to freedom from the ego, that ego that so often corrupts whatever we do.
You can find out if you are captured by this ego in three ways:
First, your words—your words—what are your words? What do you speak about? Do you speak about things? Do you speak about people? Or do you speak about God and His glory?
In our locker room at St. John Bosco High School, coach Buckley put up this sign:
Small Minds Speak About People.
Mediocre Minds Speak of Things and Events.
Great Minds Speak of Ideals.
Every one of us would see that when we went in there, and he would preach that. He didn’t want us simply downgrading other teams or other people. He wanted us to realize, you have a dignity as a Catholic athlete, you have a dignity. And that dignity is to think about the ideal: the ideal of team-men-ship, the ideal of heaven, the ideal of what God has called you to do, and why He gave you all the talents He gave you.
So first, listen to your dog-gone speech!
Second, speech initiates itself into action, because speech is the action of the mind. Now, as the heart is in the tongue, so, in the action: what do I do in regards to others?
Fathers and mothers: Do I train my child to be independent, and to walk the path that leads to the vocation that God wants for that person? Do I constrict others? Do I manipulate others? Do I sit there and want my will being forced upon that other individual? Where I find my will expressing itself in such a way, I am out of order! I am out of order.
So, second, how do I express the will? Is my will in union with the divine will of God, because ultimately each and every one of us has a vocation, to bring about the salvation of souls. If I am not working for the salvation of souls, I am working out of “the way.” [Fr. means the way of salvation.]
Finally, how often does my mind turn back to God? How often? How often do I make a union of my life with God? Spiritual communions! Ejaculations! Sending my heart to be before the Blessed Sacrament! How often do I do the thing, interiorly, that nobody can see? How often do I say, I deny myself that little extra sweet? Or, I deny myself that extra coffee, or I deny myself that extra drink? How often do I, in one way or another, make a silent sacrifice?
It is these silent sacrifices that will really tell us whether or not our heart is headed to the kingdom of heaven.
In your life and my life, one thing will matter. Not what we did, but how we reflected upon what we did. In confession, I tell people, “You are not your action, you are the reflection of your action.”
If you see that this is what you did and it was wrong, admit it! Humble thyself, and you will receive great graces from Almighty God, because ultimately, any wound that is exposed to the air, will heal. But so long as I let it be saturated with pus and everything else, it will just continue to grow and grow and grow and be worse and worse and worse. Open it up! Lance it! And that’s what we’re afraid of, so often.
But I tell you, converts that come and make good confessions and lance those things, they are the ones that receive Graces from Almighty God, and you can’t believe how quickly they can move in the way of holiness!
And so this last motion of Our Blessed Mother’s union with her Son, the burial, the sudarium, the face cloth, everything wraps Him in order that He might give to us a sign of the divine love and the divine vocation. He came into this world to die for us, to shed His blood. He gave us the ointment; He gave us the antidote to all our sins! And if we don’t take the antidote, we die! It doesn’t matter how good we think we are, we must take the antidote that God has given to us.
And let us ask Him, to open our minds and hearts during this Holy Week, to really come, to destroy the ego, and to allow the divine life of Our Lord Jesus Christ to express itself through our lives.
As the poet says so well,
Lord, you have no hands but our hands, to do your work today.
You have no feet but our feet, to lead others in Your way.
You have no tongue but our tongues, to tell* how You lived and died.
And you have no help but our help, to bring others to your side.
May Almighty God allow us to bring others to His side.
(tape ends abruptly here)
*Fr. Voigt has “tell men and women” here but I omitted “men and women” to make each line 14 syllables (not counting the “and” starting the last line).