The Chains That Made a Father
MASS Effúsum est
LESSON Isaiah 58: 7-11
GOSPEL St Matthew 19: 13-21
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
The Church begins this Mass with a cry of almost unbearable sorrow: “My liver is poured out upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people, when the child and the suckling fainted away in the streets of the city.” Yet at once she adds: “Praise the Lord, ye children: praise ye the name of the Lord.”
The children are fainting in the streets, and nevertheless the children are summoned to praise God. Misery has not been denied; it has been brought into the sanctuary. The abandoned child has not been hidden from sight; he has been placed in the very Introit of the Mass. The Church looks upon the misery of the innocent, and she refuses both despair and sentimentality. She laments, she prays, and then she acts.
This is the mystery of Saint Jerome Emiliani.
Jerome was not formed in the cloister, nor did sanctity appear early and easily in his life. He was a Venetian nobleman, a soldier, and for a time a careless and worldly man. During war he was captured, cast into prison, and loaded with chains. His feet were fettered; a heavy weight was fastened about his neck; escape appeared impossible.
There, in the darkness of the dungeon, Jerome discovered the first of the three chains that mark his life: the chain of human helplessness.
Until that moment, he had trusted in rank, strength, military skill, and the security of his own position. Now all had been stripped away. The soldier could not command; the nobleman could not purchase liberty; the strong man could not break his own fetters. He was reduced to poverty, and in that poverty he began to pray.
He turned to the Blessed Virgin and begged her assistance. He promised amendment of life, and he was delivered. The chains fell away; he escaped his captors; and he returned to Venice.
But bodily deliverance was only the beginning. A man may leave a prison while carrying the prison within himself. Iron chains are visible; the chains of sin, vanity, self-reliance, and spiritual indifference are more difficult to recognise. Jerome had been freed from his captors, but now grace began to free him from himself.
This is the second chain: the chain of the old man.
The Secret of today’s Mass speaks of God destroying the old man in Jerome and creating in him a new man according to His own likeness. Grace did not merely make Jerome more respectable. It did not polish the soldier while leaving his heart untouched. It put the old Jerome to death.
That is the work of conversion. Conversion is not the addition of religion to an otherwise unchanged life. It is not merely attending Mass while retaining the same ambitions, resentments, attachments, and habits. Grace does not come to decorate the old man. Grace comes to crucify him.
Jerome began to pray, to study, to serve, and eventually to prepare for the priesthood. Then famine and pestilence swept through northern Italy. The streets filled with the hungry, the sick, the dying, and above all with children who had lost their parents and their homes.
Here Jerome encountered the third chain: the chain binding the abandoned soul.
He had known captivity himself. He therefore recognised captivity in others. The children were not imprisoned behind stone walls, but they were prisoners nevertheless: prisoners of hunger, neglect, ignorance, fear, and loneliness. No iron was fastened to their feet, yet they could not free themselves.
Jerome did not merely pity them. He became a father to them.
He fed the hungry at his own expense. He sheltered the homeless. He nursed the sick and buried the dead. He founded homes for orphaned children, a refuge for penitent women, and institutions for the education of the young. He taught the children their prayers, instructed them in Christian doctrine, and trained them in useful work. At length he gave away his possessions, laid aside the dignity of a Venetian nobleman, and lived among the poor whom he served.
The Offertory describes such a life: “When thou didst pray with tears, and didst bury the dead, and didst leave thy dinner, and hide the dead in thy house, and bury them by night, I offered thy prayer to the Lord.”
Nothing done for God is lost. The world may not see it. No applause may follow it. No monument may record it. Yet the angel carries it before the throne of God. The interrupted meal, the sleepless night, the sick body washed, the lonely person visited, the dead buried, the ignorant instructed, and the child protected—all these may become an oblation.
Jerome’s charity was not philanthropy with a Christian label attached. It was sacrificial. He did not merely distribute what he possessed; he allowed himself to be distributed. His time, strength, property, health, and finally his life were poured out.
The Gospel reveals the source of this charity.
First, little children are brought to Our Lord. The disciples attempt to prevent them, but Jesus says: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to Me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such.”
Then the rich young man approaches and asks what he must do to possess everlasting life. He has kept the commandments, yet something remains wanting. Our Lord answers: “If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow Me.”
The two scenes belong together. On one side stand the children who possess nothing; on the other stands the young man who possesses much. Christ receives the empty-handed children, and He calls the rich man to empty his hands.
Jerome heard that call.
He had once possessed rank, wealth, arms, and independence. Yet he became free only when he ceased to belong to himself. The chains of the prison were broken by deliverance; the chains of sin were broken by conversion; the chains of the abandoned were broken by charity.
But the Collect takes us still deeper. It asks God, through the intercession of blessed Jerome, the helper and father of orphans, that we may faithfully preserve the spirit of adoption whereby we are called His children.
Jerome became a father because he first learned to be a son.
Christian charity begins here. We do not love the abandoned merely because they are unfortunate. We love them because God loved us when we were estranged. We receive them because Christ received us. We seek them because the Good Shepherd sought us. We become fathers to the fatherless because God has adopted us in His Son.
Our own age is full of orphans, including many whose parents are still alive.
Children may be clothed, fed, educated, and entertained, yet remain spiritually abandoned. They may possess devices but lack attention; receive information but lack wisdom; be encouraged to express themselves while never being taught what they are; hear endlessly of choice while scarcely hearing of truth, sacrifice, duty, chastity, grace, judgment, or eternal life.
Their innocence is treated as an inconvenience. Their imaginations are invaded by commerce and ideology. Their minds are formed by strangers. Their souls are addressed by almost everyone except those charged by God to guide them towards heaven.
The Introit is therefore not merely an ancient lamentation. The child and the suckling still faint in the streets of the city.
They faint where fathers refuse to govern, where mothers are unsupported in their vocation, where priests do not teach, where schools undermine what parents ought to defend, and where society speaks loudly of children’s rights while depriving children of the truth that alone can make them free.
The crisis is not only one of material abandonment. It is a crisis of fatherhood.
A father does more than provide. He names, protects, teaches, corrects, sacrifices, and remains. A spiritual father does not flatter souls or confirm them in confusion. He gives them truth because truth is a form of love. He disciplines because heaven matters. He refuses to abandon the child to the world, even when the world calls abandonment compassion.
This is why the Communion joins two duties that modern men constantly separate: “Religion clean and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation, and to keep oneself unspotted from this world.”
We must visit the afflicted, and we must remain unspotted.
Charity without purity becomes sentimentality. Purity without charity becomes hardness. The saint must enter the misery of the world without allowing the rebellion of the world to enter him. He must bend low without lowering the truth. He must touch wounds without calling wounds health.
The commemoration of Saint Margaret, Virgin and Martyr, completes this lesson. Jerome defended innocence in the abandoned; Margaret defended innocence in herself. He resisted the cruelty that neglects the weak; she resisted the power that seeks to corrupt the pure. Both declared that the human soul belongs first to God.
Saint Jerome eventually contracted disease while tending the sick. The soldier who had once fought for earthly possessions died having surrendered almost everything. Yet he was richer than when he had been a Venetian nobleman. He had acquired treasure in heaven. The prisoner had become free. The orphaned child had become a father. The old man had died, and Christ lived in him.
Soon we shall approach the altar.
We come as children who possess nothing that has not been given to us. We come hungry, dependent, and unable to save ourselves. Christ does not forbid us. He receives us. He feeds us with His own Body. He renews in us the spirit of adoption.
But those who have been received by Christ must not leave others abandoned.
Somewhere near each of us is a soul in chains: a child needing protection, a young person needing instruction, a sinner needing correction, a sick person needing companionship, a lonely person needing fidelity, or a confused soul needing the clarity of Catholic truth.
Our Lord says: “I will not leave you orphans: I will come to you.”
He comes to us upon this altar. May He come through us to those who are fainting in the streets.
May Saint Jerome Emiliani obtain for us the grace to break with the old man, to spend ourselves for those whom the world forgets, and to live as true children of the Father, until every chain has fallen and we enter the liberty of the children of God.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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