'We will not stop celebrating Mass.' Sunday Reflections, Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Christ in Agony on the Cross

El Greco [Web Gallery of Art]

When the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross falls on a Sunday, as a feast of the Lord it replaces the celebration of the Sunday in Ordinary Time. So the Mass of the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time is not celebrated this year.

Readings (Jerusalem Bible: Australia, Ireland, New Zealand)

Readings (English Standard Version, Catholic Edition: England & Wales, India, Scotland) 

Readings (New American Bible: Philippines, USA)

Gospel John 3:13-17 (English Standard Version, Anglicised)

At that time: Jesus said to Nicodemus, ‘No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’

Léachtaí i nGaeilge

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Fr Ragheed Aziz Ganni

(20 January 1972 - 3 June 2007)

For me the face of the persecuted Christians in today's world is that of Fr Ragheed Ganni. An article by Ed West published in the Catholic Herald, now published monthly in England, on 20 December 2013 and that has a very personal dimension, gives as good an account of Father Ragheed as any I've read. (The link to the article that I used before no longer functions.)

Ed West writes: Fr Ragheed was one of 1,000 Iraqi Christians murdered during the pogrom that began after the Coalition invasion of 2003. The persecution culminated in October 31 2010, with the massacre of 52 worshippers at a Catholic church in Baghdad. In the words of one Chaldean bishop, this is a 'Calvary' that has largely been ignored in the western media, outside of the Christian press . . .

 It has been a shocking and horrific ordeal for one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, which has been all but driven out of its homeland. A pre-war population of a million is now somewhere in the region of 150,000, many of them elderly, and more than 60 churches have been bombed.  That figure has got smaller in recent months and the ancient city of Mosul, in many ways the heart of the Christian faith in Iraq and Syria, has been emptied of its Christians by ISIS.

The article describes First Holy Communion day in Father Ragheed's parish in 2006: The atmosphere in Ragheed’s home town had become terrifying. On 4 August 2006, when 80 children of his parish of the Holy Spirit received their first Holy Communion, battles broke out in the street outside, and the children cowered from the sounds of guns and rockets.

The good shepherd helped them through. He told AsiaNews: 'Although people are used to it and remained reasonably calm, they started to wonder whether they were going to make it back to their homes or not. I was aware of the immense joy of the 80 children receiving their first Communion so I turned the subject into a joke and said to them: "Do not panic, these are fireworks. The city is celebrating with us." And at the same time I gave them instructions to leave the church quietly and quickly.'

The author further notes: Friends later recalled that he had become increasingly weary and broken by the demands of the priesthood amid such terror. After an attack on his parish, on Palm Sunday 2007, he wrote: 'We empathise with Christ, who entered Jerusalem in full knowledge that the consequence of His love for mankind was the cross. Thus while bullets smashed our church windows, we offered up our suffering as a sign of love for Christ.'

Shortly before his death Fr Ganni wrote in an email: 'Each day we wait for the decisive attack, but we will not stop celebrating Mass; we will do it underground, where we are safer. I am encouraged in this decision by the strength of my parishioners. This is war, real war, but we hope to carry our cross to the very end with the help of Divine Grace.'

This young Iraqi priest of the Chaldean Catholic Church, an engineer by profession, was murdered on Trinity Sunday, 3 June 2007, along with three subdeacons, Basman Yousef Daud, Gassan Isam Bidawed and Wahid Hanna Isho after he had celebrated Mass in Mosul, the city of his birth.

At a Eucharistic Congress in Bari, Italy, in 2005 Father Ragheed said, There are days when I feel frail and full of fear. But when, holding the Eucharist, I say ‘Behold the Lamb of God Behold, who takes away the sin of the world’, I feel His strength in me. When I hold the Host in my hands, it is really He who is holding me and all of us, challenging the terrorists and keeping us united in His boundless love. He also said, Without Sunday, without the Eucharist, the Christians in Iraq cannot survive.

To put some time perspective on the Christian faith in Iraq and Syria: in 2021 the Church in the Philippines will celebrate 500 years of the Catholic Christian faith in that country, a great occasion for thanking God for that precious gift. The Christian faith has been lived in Iraq and Syria for four times as long as that, since the time of the Apostles. Mass was celebrated for 2,000 years in Mosul until a couple of months ago when Christians were driven from their ancestral homeland by ISIS.

Father Raqheed's words, But when, holding the Eucharist, I say ‘Behold the Lamb of God Behold, who takes away the sin of the world’, I feel His strength in me, reflect the words of Jesus to Nicodemus in today's Gospel: And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

A Muslim friend of Fr Ragheed, Adnam Mokrani, professor of Islamic Studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, said that on his ordination day, 13 October 2001, recalled that the new priest said, Today, I have died to self. St Paul in today's Second Reading tells us, Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God has something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave and that he became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.

As we celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross and as we pray for persecuted Christians, particularly in Iraq and Syria, parts of Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other places, may we thank God for the gift of our Christian faith and ask him for the courage to live it as Father Ragheed and countless others have done, becoming obedient to the point of death.                                   

 

Christ on the Cross

Velázquez [Web Gallery of Art]

Traditional Latin Mass 

What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful (Benedict XVI). 

 The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

The Complete Mass in Latin and English is here. (Adjust the date at the top of that page to 09-14-2025 if necessary).

Readings. Epistle: Philippians 5:2-11. Gospel: John 12:31-36.

Crucifixion (1596-1600)

El Greco [Web Gallery of Art]

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to Myself (Gospel). 

Two new saints. Sunday Reflections, 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

St Pier Giorgio Frassati mountain climbing in 1924 

[Wikimedia Commons]

Like Pope Pius XI, St Pier Giorgio loved to climb mountains and, like Pope St John Paul II, he loved to ski.

Readings (Jerusalem Bible: Australia, Ireland, New Zealand)

Readings (English Standard Version, Catholic Edition: England & Wales, India, Scotland) 

Readings (New American Bible: Philippines, USA)

Gospel Luke 14:25-33 (English Standard Version, Anglicised)

At that time: Great crowds accompanied Jesus, and he turned and said to them, ‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish.” Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.’

Léachtaí i nGaeilge

St Pier Giorgio Frassati 

[Wikimedia Commons]

This Sunday Pope Leo will canonise two Italians who died young, Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati (6 April 1901 – 4 July 1925) and Blessed Carlo Acutis (3 May 1991 – 12 October 2006). Instead of commenting on the Gospel, since these two young men lived the Gospel, I'll share from what I've posted before about them.

In the first week of June 2015 I went on a pilgrimage from Ireland to northern Italy with members of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association. On our first morning there we visited the Shroud of Turin. When we entered the cathedral proper I saw on one of the side-altars to my left a portrait I was familiar with, that of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati. I was probably the only one in our group who noticed it and whose heart leaped with joy on seeing it. I went over to pray, not realising at the time that under the altar was the tomb of this young man who when he died was only one-third of the age that I was then. When we were back on the bus I was happy to tell my fellow pilgrims about this most attractive of saintly people of our times.

Tomb of Blessed Pier Giorgio 

[Wikimedia Commons]

Thanks to St John Paul II, who beatified Pier Giorgio on 20 May 1990, the 4oth anniversary of my First Holy Communion, I had come to know something of the inspiring life of this young man, born into privilege but who had both a great zest for life and a great love for the poor, the latter something his family knew very little about, though they had seen signs of it in his childhood. One time when a woman with a young son came begging at the Frassati home Pier Giorgio noticed that the boy had no shoes. He took off his own and gave them to the youngster. There is a very good summary of his life here.

St John Paul saw the importance of bringing to our attention the lives of saints of our times, from every walk of life. In his homily at the beatification Pope John Paul, who all his life as a priest had a special love for young adults, said: 

Faith and charity, the true driving forces of his existence, made him active and diligent in the milieu in which he lived, in his family and school, in the university and society; they transformed him into a joyful, enthusiastic apostle of Christ, a passionate follower of his message and charity. The secret of his apostolic zeal and holiness is to be sought in the ascetical and spiritual journey which he traveled; in prayer, in persevering adoration, even at night, of the Blessed Sacrament, in his thirst for the Word of God, which he sought in Biblical texts; in the peaceful acceptance of life’s difficulties, in family life as well; in chastity lived as a cheerful, uncompromising discipline; in his daily love of silence and life’s 'ordinariness'. 

It is precisely in these factors that we are given to understand the deep well-spring of his spiritual vitality. Indeed, it is through the Eucharist that Christ communicates his Spirit; it is through listening to the word that the readiness to welcome others grows, and it is also through prayerful abandonment to God’s will that life’s great decisions mature. Only by adoring God who is present in his or her own heart can the baptized Christian respond to the person who 'asks you for a reason for your hope' (1 Pt 3:15). And the young Frassati knew it, felt it, lived it. In his life, faith was fused with charity: firm in faith and active in charity, because without works, faith is dead (cf. James 2:20).

Pope St John Paul gave the name 'The Man of the Eight Beatitudes' to St Pier Giorgio. He said in 1989: I, too, in my youth, felt the beneficial influence of his example and, as a student, I was impressed by the force of his Christian testimony. 

In a message to the youth of Turin in 2010 Pope Benedict XVI said: Like [Pier Giorgio], discovered that it is worth it to commit oneself for God and with God, to respond to his call in the fundamental decisions and the daily ones, even when it is costly.

In his Message for World Youth Day 2014 Pope Francis quoted the young man from Turin: As Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati once said, 'To live without faith, to have no heritage to uphold, to fail to struggle constantly to defend the truth: this is not living. It is scraping by. We should never just scrape by, but really live'.

Blessed Pier Giorgio's last climb, 7 June 1925 

[Wikimedia Commons]

Blessed Pier Giorgio died from polio, after a week of great pain. He very probably contracted it from some of the poor whom he visited in their homes. His family were astonished at the huge numbers of poor people who lined the streets of Turin for his funeral.

This young man is such a great model of discipleship for all, not only young people, because he took the words of Jesus to heart: Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all. He enjoyed life. He had a very strong sense of justice along with a real awareness of the needs of the person in front of him. Charity is not enough: we need social reform, he used to say. He was, in the words of St John Paul II, a joyful, enthusiastic apostle of Christ, the kind of follower of Jesus that Pope Francis frequently called us to be.

St Pier Giorgio lived each moment. In his homily at the beatification Pope St John Paul II highlighted something very important: his daily love of silence and life’s 'ordinariness'. This is where we find God.

St Carlo Acutis

Earlier this year Pope Francis described Blessed Carlo Acutis as a young saint of and for our times, (who) shows you, and all of us, how possible it is in today’s world for young people to follow Jesus, share His teachings with others, and so find the fullness of life in joy, freedom and holiness. The video above shows how he affected the lives of others, especially his mother. The man speaking in the last part of the video is Rajesh Mohur, a Hindu from Mauritius who was employed by the Acutis family. Through the example of Carlo he became a Catholic, as did his mother later.

Both Pier Giorgio and Carlo had a profound understanding of the Mass and of Eucharistic adoration and of the place of our Blessed Mother in the mission of the Church. Both saw poor people as their brothers and sisters. Both had a sense of joy in their lives, the joy that comes only from Jesus: These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full (John 15:11).

There is a wealth of information about both of these saints on the internet, including many videos on YouTube. Though Pier Giorgio might be, Carlo would not at all be surprised by this since he grew up in the first 'internet generation' and saw the potential of this new medium to share the Gospel.

The Apostle Paul in Prison

Rembrandt [Web Gallery of Art]

Yet for love's sake I prefer to appeal to you—I, Paul, an old man and now a prisoner also for Christ Jesus . . . (Philemon 9; Second Reading).

These two new saints are seen by many as models for young people, as indeed they are. But they are saints for much older people like myself. When I first came across Pier Giorgio - I can't remember when - I was immediately drawn to and inspired by him. He died at the age I was ordained. In today's Second Reading, from St Paul's Letter to Philemon, his shortest, we read how a young man, Onesimus, meant so much to St Paul. Onesimus had been a bondservant of Philemon. St Paul writes: I appeal to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I became in my imprisonment. I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart. 

St Paul then writes something that I think we Christians have yet to take fully on board about who we really are: For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back for ever, no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother — especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. So if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me.

St Pier Giorgio Frassati and St Carlo Acutis both took these words of St Paul fully on board.

Traditional Latin Mass 

What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful (Benedict XVI). 

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The Complete Mass in Latin and English is here. (Adjust the date at the top of that page to 09-07-2025 if necessary).

Epistle: Galatians 3:16-22. Gospel: Luke 17:11-19.

Codex Aureus of Echternach

German Miniaturist [Web Gallery of Art]

The bottom panel shows the healing of the ten lepers

'Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner? And he said to him, 'Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well' (Luke 17:18-19; Gospel).