I just want to start by saying thanks to everyone who prayed for me during my vacation to Italy. It was great, it went really well, travel was smooth, weather was great, food was awesome, and I got to see some amazing “Church things.” Some people call it Catholic Disneyland over there, just so many Catholic things to see and do. 

 

I was with a small group of priests, four of us flew over there and we met up with a priest friend from here who is there studying for his doctorate.  He joined us for a few meals and Masses in Rome, as well as going with us to Venice for two days.  

 

I had been to Rome a couple times prior, but never to Venice, which was unlike any place I had ever been with the canals and the city just seemingly built on the water. 

 

In Venice they have the body of St. Mark, so that was cool to be able to pray with him, but also we visited the church in Rome which holds the Apostles Philip and James the Lesser, saw the index finger of Doubting Thomas, celebrated Mass at the church that has St. Paul, and then we actually got to see the bones of St. Peter.  

 

I wasn’t sure if we would be able to see Peter’s bones or not, but they are under plexi-glass directly under the High Altar at St. Peter’s Basilica. We had Mass there only about ten feet away which was surreal. I prayed for all of you at that Mass, as well as at a Mass I celebrated as St. John Lateran which was where the first actual Christian Church was built after Christianity was made legal by Constantine.  The Lateran family gave them this land to build the first church, and it is actually the Pope’s church, it is where his chair is at, the cathedra in Latin.

 

One of the other priests on the trip had just lost his mom as well, so we took some time to pray with St. Monica, one of the most famous mothers in Christianity, who prayed constantly for her son Augustine to turn to Jesus and be truly holy.

 

At the tomb of St. Philip Neri I was able to pray for my classmates who were ordained with me on his feast day, so that was really special.  We also got to pray at the tomb of Catherine of Siena, another spiritual giant.  

 

And on Valentine’s Day we visited one of the oldest house churches in history, the family home of our 4th Pope, St. Clement, but at that Church they happened to have the body St. Cyril, and Valentine’s Day is actually Cyril’s feast day, Cyril and Methodius who were brothers, so that was great timing.  And Ignatius of Antioch is there too, he is one of my favorite saints.

 

At many of the Churches it wasn’t only saints that were on display, it was amazing artwork.  Some of my favorites were by Michelangelo, Carvaggio and Raphael, there was just all over, so you almost get desensitized to seeing it.

 

And of course we got to see Pope Francis at a General Audience which is that picture from the front of today’s Bulletin, we were about 100 feet away.  Most nights we walked home through the front of St. Peters and it was so impressive, there are these massive pillars that look like arms reaching out to the world. 

 

After seeing all of these amazing Saints and Art, one of the most striking things that we saw was there in front of the Basilica in that square: it was the exact spot where Pope John Paul II was shot, commemorated by a tile on the ground.  

 

On May 13, 1981, JPII was shot twice by Mehmet Ali Ağca, a professional assassin.  He miraculously survived, thanking the Blessed Virgin Mary for guiding the bullet to miss his major arteries and organs. Ali Agca was caught and sentenced to life in prison, but after JPII recovered, he went to visit him in prison, and he forgave him.  

 

Ali Agca told him that he never misses and he knew the Pope was supernaturally protected at that moment.  As a result of that, and the forgiveness the Pope offered him, Ali Agca converted from being a Muslim and actually asked JPII to hear his confession, and he was present at the pope’s funeral in 2005.

 

This story is a great example of what our Gospel spoke of today.  Jesus is asking us to practice radical mercy and radical generosity, even in the face of great evil. Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father…”

 

It is important to remember that in the Bible, love, although it can be expressed through affection, is not defined as an emotion. It is not defined as a feeling, although we tend to think of love as a feeling. Love, the definition of love in the Bible, is to choose the good for another person. It's to “will” the good of another. So in other words, it is not an emotion, it’s an act of the will, it’s a choice. 

 

No matter what we feel about someone who has hurt us, if we pray for them, if we ask the Lord to bless them, if we ask God to bless them and to give good things to them, to bring about their repentance, to give them life and health - that is an act of love. To pray for someone else is to take our precious time and use it for their benefit and for their good, and that alone is a generous act of love. 

 

It is very important for us to understand that we don’t have to feel anything toward an enemy to love our enemy. We just have to do good to that enemy, especially by praying for them, by interceding for them and by offering penance and sacrifices for them. And in doing so Jesus says “you'll be children of God, like God, you'll be like the Father in heaven who blesses those who hate him, kind and merciful.” 

 

St. Catherine of Siena says in her Dialogues that “the reason God created multiple human beings, the reason he gave us neighbors who he knew would harm us, hurt us, insult us and sin against us, was because he wanted us to love with the most perfect kind of love, which is to love like He loves.”

 

In order to grow in love, to per-fect our love, St. Catherine says God made our neighbor so that we can love those who don't love us, so we can love those who hate us, and in that way our love would be more God-like, because God loves not just the just, He loves the unjust.

 

So this is why the Saints have always said “love of neighbor” is in a certain sense the highest form of love, and it is certainly necessary for salvation, because it is God-like to love those who don't love us. When we love God or our friends, we love someone who loves us, and that’s easy, but that doesn’t help us to grow.

 

In closing then, what is Jesus calling us to do? Well, the last thing He says is “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Now is He serious, I mean come on, what could this possibly mean? 

 

We need to think of it like a first century Jew. How would they have heard it? They would’ve heard an echo of the book of Leviticus written by Moses, which is actually the first reading for this week.

 

So if you remember that first reading, it has two commandments. “Be holy, for I, the LORD, your God, am holy” is the first part, and then “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Now why is that significant? Well, what it shows is that in the Old Testament the command was “you shall be holy.” 

 

That is Moses’ goal. That’s the vocation of the Israelites, to be holy. What does that mean? Well when most of us think of the word “holy,” we think of somebody who's really, really, really good, and maybe a little uptight about it too. But we don’t think of “holiness” the way they did.

 

In the Old Testament, the word “holy” meant “separated,” literally qadosh, to be separate. So what Moses is saying is, he is calling Israel to be separate, separated from sin, and separated for God. That's what holy means, set apart. Set apart from sin and set apart for God. 

 

But Jesus goes beyond that. He doesn't just want us to be holy, set apart from sin, he wants us to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. The Greek word there is teleios, which doesn't just mean perfect, it means complete. 

 

Most of us when we think of perfect, we think flawless. Well in this life that's not possible because we are all sinners. We can’t be without fault or without flaw, but we can be complete. Jesus Christ is calling us to be complete, to be teleios. The word telos means goal or end, so He is calling us to meet our goal. 

 

What is our end? To love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. And this is really what the “Universal Call to Holiness” is all about.

 

St. Paul affirmed this call in our second reading when he said, “Brothers and sisters: Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.”

 

Vatican II, Lumen Gentium chapter 11 paragraph 3 says this, “all the faithful,

whatever their condition or state, are called by the Lord, each in his own way, to

that perfect holiness whereby the Father Himself is perfect.” 

 

So Vatican II makes it very clear that when Jesus says “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” He is not just talking to nuns or to priests or to consecrated religious - sometimes Catholics can be tempted to think that “well the Sermon on the Mount, that's for the religious, that's for the priests, that's for the nuns.” - No! 

 

Vatican II said the call to holiness and the call to the perfection of love is a universal call, a call to every single soul, it's a Universal Call to Holiness in order to reach our final destiny: heaven.

 

Jesus's words here are not a command to do something that's impossible, but a command to do something that is not only possible but exactly what we were made for, to be complete and holy so to join Him in Heaven, but only with the grace of God. 

 

As we approach the start of Lent this week, what do we need to do to become more holy? How can we grow to love better to make ourselves complete? 

 

This is Jesus’ challenge to us, to show radical kindness and mercy in how we love our neighbors, so I pray that we will be given the grace to become holy and show we are true children of our Heavenly Father.