Homily

Recently I was reading again about The Great Famine, a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1849. With a population of about eight million, during the famine, about one million people died and a million more emigrated causing Ireland's population to fall by between 20% and 25%. The event is sometimes referred to as the Irish Potato Famine, mostly outside Ireland. The basic cause of the famine was a natural event, a potato blight which infected potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s but hit Ireland the worst of all. The one million dead because of starvation, and the diseases that accompany times of famine: fever, diphtheria, cholera, smallpox, dysentery, and flu.

The article was about the Irish clergy and how some of the priests served the faithful during this time. The article stated that in the midst of all this suffering, disease and death, what most people wanted was to have priests hear their confessions, to receive Holy Communion, to be anointed when they were sick and to be reminded of the reality of Heaven.

One priest, Father Hugh Quigley of Killaloe, told about his daily life at the peak of the famine. He wrote:

“We rise at 4:00—when not obliged to attend a night call—and we proceed on horseback a distance from four to seven miles to hold stations for confessions for the convenience of the people who flock in thousands to prepare themselves for the death they look to as inevitable.

At these stations we remain up to 5:00 p.m. administering both consolation and instruction to the starving thousands…The confessions are often interrupted by calls to the dying, and generally on our way home we have to …administer the last rites…to one or more fever patients.”

One priest told of having to enter a hut, where the body of a man had been dead for several days. His wife and children could no longer even stand up, and they tried to help the priest remove the body crawling on their knees. Sometimes the dead were abandoned and the priests were left to bury them. One priest sold everything he had in order to buy food for his parishioners. A government inspector reported that there were priests without decent clothes and sometimes even without shoes. He wrote,

“In some instances where the priests were confined with fever, I found nothing in their cabins except oatmeal…no tea, no sugar, no provisions whatever; in some of their huts the wind blew, the snow came in and the rain dripped.”

Many priests, religious brothers and nuns died during this famine. In one diocese, 10% of the priests lost their lives.

I tell you this story not to specifically point out the heroic actions of so many priests in Ireland during this time, because I have no doubt that there were also clergy who did not serve well, and also I am sure that there were many laymen and women who also acted with just as much heroic virtue as priests. I tell of these things not even just to point out the great deeds and sacrifices of these men, even though that is an amazing story in itself. I tell you this because these men acted and lived as saints during this time. How so? Because they loved God and they strove to love their neighbor as themselves. And in that focus, loving God and loving their neighbor as themselves, everything else became of secondary importance. They labored and served and lived not for themselves but for the sake of God and for the service to their neighbors, their parishioners. These are the actions of saints.

It is true that the lives of saints are often filled with heroic actions, but heroic actions are not what makes a saint a saint. A saint is one who truly strives to love God and to love his neighbor as himself, even if the neighbor is family and friends. To love God first and to put our trust in Him, to put our lives into His hands and direct ourselves according to His commandments, to live as though He is our beginning and our end and give Him the glory and praise that is due to Him, because this is our great vocation as human beings, and that’s what makes a saint. To love our neighbor, in our family, where we live, where we work, where we pray, to love our neighbor as best we can, using the grace that the Lord wants to give to us so that we can love them better and better. After God, to put them first and humbly do our best to love and care for them—this is the life of a saint. It does not require what might be considered great and heroic deeds. But it does require our desire so that we set our lives, and reset our lives, over and over again if needed, to live as though God is first, others are second and I want to love and serve both God and neighbor because there I find the true essence of the reason for why I am living. It can be very hard to do sometimes, this is certainly true. Our sinful impulse is always trying to put ourselves in first place. But we must continue to struggle on against this impulse because we were made for loving service, and because our time here is not long.

The world can never understand this. It constantly throws out one thing after another, after another, after another and demands that we pay importance to this thing and that thing. The newspapers, internet and other media are constantly telling us that we must deal with this and that, the most important thing in the world for today, or this week, or this month because the focus is always changing, whether it’s about the economy, or disease, or social issues, or politics. The world will never, ever ask you to love God first and your neighbor as yourself. But this must be our constant goal because everything we were born for falls in line under these two commandments, and following these commandments is what makes us saints.

Obituaries in the Register-Guard are often dedicated to praising the dead with phrases such as “he loved his family, his dog and being out in nature.” Okay, so be it. But let our obituaries read, “She loved the Lord God with her whole heart, her whole mind and her whole soul and her neighbor as herself.” My friends, let’s not give up, let’s push on ahead, we are the ordinary people who are called to be extraordinary—we’re called to be saints, and we can become saints if we keep focused, and over and over again asking the Lord to give us the grace we need to live as His holy ones.