My dear parishioners, we must begin with the radical defense of what we profess in the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church”.  [ ROMAN MISSAL]  The days of God abasing himself before a bewildered and arrogant humanity are over. They ended with the Apostle Thomas whom Our Lord Jesus rebuked for daring to put his fingers and hand into his wounds.
 
Beware of any person, whether clergy or laity, who defends his conscience while judging God’s truth: “he is a hireling and cares nothing for the sheep”.  [Jn 10:13]  This said, one will worship God as a divine person and obey God’s truth, or he will obey the content of his own mind and worship his own human creatureliness. It’s going to be one or the other.
 
Until the day of Our Lord’s coming in glory, human history will stand always in the shadow of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This conflicted generation, like all others preceding it, cannot breach the walls and return triumphantly to Eden. The cherubim still stands guard. The flaming sword still turns in the gate to protect the Tree of Life and all it represents.
 
Our Christian mission is precisely what Christ said it is:  “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you”.  [Mt 28:19-20]  This generation’s Catholic laity must not waste their God-given opportunity to help purify and strengthen the Church in the “mind of Christ”.  [1Cor 2:16] 
 
We cannot wait for the post-Christian western world to slog through a thousand year plague of so-called hate crimes, never-ending two-faced apologies by craven public leaders, and indentured servitude to social media tech titans, only to scrawl its own epitaph in the unforgiving dust of human history: Gosh, what we needed all along was a moral and ethical system.
 
As Pope Saint John Paul II observed, this will be a Christian century or no century at all. I am not speaking of Lot’s narrow escape from Sodom and Gomorrah  [cf. Gen 19:26], but I am deeply concerned that future generations may look back on our very own generation and condemn it as a pillar of salt.
 
So let us be about the urgent and compelling mission of the Roman Catholic Church. I am speaking of the absolute, eternal and unchanging victory won 2,000 years ago by the Lord Jesus Christ on Golgotha's cross. I appeal to you to thoroughly understand the thought of St. John Chrysostom (347-407 AD), the renown Patriarch of Constantinople:
 
FOR YOU must long, says Christ, for heaven and the things in heaven. However, even before heaven, Christ has commanded you to make the earth a heaven.
 
DO AND SAY all things—even while you are continuing in (this world)—as having your conversation there (in heaven). . .   so that error (here) may be destroyed, and truth implanted (here) , and all wickedness cast out, and virtue return, and no difference in this respect be henceforth between heaven and earth.”  [ The Gospel of St. Matthew, Homily XIX no.7]
 
My dear friends, my fellow Catholics, God is not purifying the ministerial priesthood of the
Roman Catholic Church in the United States for nothing. I give you the joy of Our Lord’s resurrection from the dead! Sincerely in the hearts of Jesus and Mary. Your pastor, Reverend Richard Barker.