Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
I use this greeting, because I wish to emphasize that we are brothers and sisters in need of salvation. There is a great deception in thinking about high expectations as hatred or an expectation that one must be perfect. The Church invites us to excellence in order to inspire us to have faith that we can achieve greatness. How can I as a poor priest and sinner in need of mercy expect others to be perfect? I cannot. I walk at your side as an imperfect human being.
Little by little we try to be like Christ in overcoming the faults that keep us from being the best we can be. To be a pastor means to be a shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. Jesus gave us the sacraments because he knew we would sin and suffer spiritually, emotionally, and physically. The Sacraments make us holy and heal our infirmities. It is necessary when you feel angry about a homily or Church teaching to consider how this expresses love. As Pastor, I wish to help you get to heaven and help you resolve your difficulties with the Church. The salvation of souls is my priority and I wish to make Christ present to you. If I have hurt anyone in my sharing of Church teaching, I have compassion for you and want to help you. It may help you to reflect upon Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s first homily as bishop of Rome:
“The pastor must be inspired by Christ’s holy zeal: for him it is not a matter of indifference that so many people are living in the desert. And there are so many kinds of desert. There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love. There is the desert of God’s darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life. The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast… The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance… When the shepherd of all humanity, the living God, himself became a lamb, he stood on the side of the lambs, with those who are downtrodden and killed. This is how he reveals himself to be the true shepherd: “I am the Good Shepherd . . . I lay down my life for the sheep”, Jesus says of himself (Jn 10:14). It is not power, but love that redeems us! This is God’s sign: he himself is love…”
“One of the basic characteristics of a shepherd must be to love the people entrusted to him, even as he loves Christ whom he serves. ‘Feed my sheep’, says Christ to Peter, and now, at this moment, he says it to me as well. Feeding means loving, and loving also means being ready to suffer. Loving means giving the sheep what is truly good, the nourishment of God’s truth, of God’s word, the nourishment of his presence, which he gives us in the Blessed Sacrament.”
Deception invites us to dissent from Church teaching, deny sin, avoid God’s mercy in confession and separates us from the Body and Blood of Christ. Deception makes us comfortable with immoral desires and it prefers personal opinions over Church teaching. My obligation is both to love each person and teach difficult truths. If you fall in love with Jesus, you will wish to please God in all things and submit to the Father, who is love. Without love, it is impossible to understand the narrow way of Jesus as the only way to fulfillment and true joy. My desire is to help each person encounter the love of Christ and the goal of my preaching is to reveal Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
Your servant in Christ, Father Paul