https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BFSc5uUwuO8
Well, let us begin with a prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Well, good morning all. Today is the feast of the Annunciation. So we’re just going to entrust this entire live stream and this whole new way of doing things to Our Lady on the day when she conceived our Lord in her womb. So we’re going to continue our theme of Christian marriage and we’re going to be talking about the domestic church today. So one thing that we can first look at is the church as the family of God. So when God identifies himself in the Old Testament, very frequently he uses the image of Father. I am God, the Father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And so, well, if you have a father that implies naturally that he’s talking about a sort of family situation. And you can see how the church lives together as a family. So our home is the church, right? You can think of your home as being the church and that our heavenly homeland is our true home. So when we join the church triumphant in heaven, that’s the sense of we’ve made it. We are here in our true home, which is heaven. You also think of things that families do together. They hopefully are able to have meals together frequently and, you know, the mass, the Holy Mass is a great sacrifice. But it’s also a sacrificial meal that we share together. And so both of those things are true at once. And so that’s what families hopefully are able to do is they’re able to have that family meal together. And finally, living together, we have our little disagreements, our little squabbles. That’s a very, very familial thing, as I’m sure you’re all familiar with. Because we’re not perfect like our heavenly father, we butt heads, we go against each other. And so we can think of the church as the family of God. Now we can also think of the family of a Christian family as the domestic church. So what is the church? You can think of it as the union of all believers on earth. That’s what the church is. The union of all believers on earth. Scripture gives us two primary images. You can talk about the church as the body of Christ. And so that really gets that union part. And also scriptures give us the image of the bride of Christ. We’re going to focus mostly on the image of the body of Christ today. Body of Christ, the union of all believers on earth. And so Jesus says, wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them. So even in your family, all Christians, you can say, we are the church right now. As church, every family would have the three offices of every Christian. You’ve probably heard this before. Every Christian, by virtue of their baptism, is a priest, a prophet, and a king. Priest, prophet, king. Those are the three offices we hold in virtue of our baptism. And so let’s look at the family as a unit, as priest, prophet, and king. So what do priests do? One of the jobs is to offer up sacrifices. So whenever Father Phil or Father Will celebrates Mass, they’re offering up the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross again. Secondly, and so what does it look like for a family to be offering up their sacrifices? You can imagine at the point of Mass, when they’re bringing the gifts forward to the altar, you can imagine putting all the sacrifices that your family’s made on the patent there and bringing that to the Lord, right? And so your sacrifices as a family and the sacrifice of the Mass are not contradictory, they’re complementary. You can bring those together with the whole Christian community together to the altar for the sacrifice. Moreover, priests are leaders of prayer. And so the family is supposed to be in part a school of prayer where you learn how to pray. And I remember very clearly the bedtime prayers that my dad would say with me when I was real young. And I remember those really fondly. It was a very nice moment, just me and dad saying our little bedtime prayer. And that was like the first place I started to learn how to pray. It was the sign of the cross and those bedtime prayers, followed very closely by the Our Father and the Hail Mary. And then priests are also supposed to be mediators between God and men. So they’re supposed to be, to your family, your family as priests is supposed to be a beacon of light. You’re bringing God to the world. So that’s priests. Let’s take a look at prophet. Prophets don’t necessarily tell the future, right? A lot of people reduce prophecy to just being able to tell the future. That’s certainly a part of the Old Testament prophecies, but it’s not the whole thing. The true job of a prophet is to speak on behalf of God, right? So the word prophet basically means somebody who speaks in between the king and the people. And so that’s what the prophecy is all about. To speak on behalf of God to the world. And so you can think of it this way. Catholic parents are the first teachers of the faith to their children. And the Catholic family, that’s the first place that you would learn the faith. And then secondly, the Catholic family, if it’s a strong Catholic family, becomes a witness to the world. If they’re really doing their jobs properly, everybody can look at that and say, that’s a model Catholic family over there. That can be quite a great evangelical witness to the world. And then the family with the kingly office. What does the family with the kingly office looks like? And you could say that God has given every soul some sort of mission. And so that we can extend that to the family in every way the family will have some sort of a collective mission. Now there’s going to be a lot of things that are going to look exactly the same for every family, right? So if you’re going to be a good family, your focus should be on giving glory to God by your way of life. And in some way, bringing souls to salvation. It might just be the souls of your family and those close to you. You don’t necessarily have to be evangelical family. Now some families might be in a position where they can do this a little more intensely. So I can think of if you had a Catholic family running a farm as a family together. You know, it should be, yeah, we’re doing this as farmers and we’re also doing this as Catholics. And you could think of even more intense ways. Let’s say there was like a family owned Christian bookstore. Like that would be a more intense thing. And then especially among Protestants, they have missionary families. So they’ll go and live in Japan and preach the gospel there somehow. And so anyway, those are obviously special cases, but every family is going to at least have the mission of giving glory to God and salvation to souls. So that’s the family. So we want to look at the father’s role in the domestic church. So we can look at that again as priest, prophet and king. Now for the priest, here’s an interesting thing. Before the time of Moses, every family that was just in the sight of God, the father of the family was the priest. So if you’re reading through Genesis chapter 11 and onwards, you see very often that Abraham is the one who’s offering sacrifices to God. They don’t have to go and find a priest every time that they want to offer sacrifice. Abraham is considered worthy of doing that himself. And so Abraham would sacrifice animals. That’s that aspect of sacrifice. He would perform circumcision on those of his household, which was a prefigurement of baptism. And then he was very certain to impart his blessing to Isaac. And so he was able to do that. Now after the time of Moses, the formal sacrifices began to be offered by the Levites and the chief priests. But that didn’t erase the common priesthood. Now we’ve got the ministerial priesthood of Jesus Christ, one of these. And it doesn’t contradict the priesthood that all believers have. And so what does a priesthood of all believers have? You offer up your personal sacrifices. As a father of the family, it’s your responsibility to do this, to offer up first your own sacrifices and then leading your family in offering up good sacrifices to God. Moreover, as a father of the family, you would be responsible for leading prayers for the family. Just like my dad at my bedside, he was a leader of prayer for me and he taught me how to pray. He was able to use his responsibility, which he took on, to lead the family in prayer. He would lead our family rosaries and he would lead mealtime prayers. At Christmas when we would pray around the Nativity set, he would be the leader of that. So that’s all on the father of the family, his responsibility to be leading that. It’s not to say that your wife would be unable to lead prayers or your children be unable to lead certain prayers, but it’s really your responsibility and your primary role to be the high priest of your households. And then finally, as a father or as a head of a household, you’re able to offer blessings to your children in terms of your natural authority as a Christian father. I think a lot of Catholic fathers just don’t know that they’re able to do that. We’re going to talk about how exactly to do that later. It’s not that hard. Just like Abraham offered his blessing to Isaac at the end of his life. So that’s the priestly office. We’ve got the prophetic office. What does the prophetic office of a father look like in a family? So I look at mine and my family and my mom is a faithful Catholic woman. She was a good example of how to be a good Christian in the world. We knew she was a woman of prayer and all those things and a good model for me as a kid. But at the end of the day, when I look back on my life on who had the biggest influence on my faith, I would have to say that it was my father. It was my father who taught me the faith. He really took that responsibility on and it stuck. And so if you look at research polls, especially the Pew Research Center, every research poll ever shows that the degree to which a father in the family is involved in his faith, that’ll be the degree to which their children are adhering to the faith. And that every time I’ve seen it, it remains to be true. So we had about 14 of us in my class at the seminary and most of us were under 30. I got to meet a fair number of the parents of my brother seminarians. For that target range of the guys who were under 30, I think every single one of them had a father who was deeply involved in the faith. And so that created an environment at home where my classmates were encouraged and felt free to join the seminary early. They didn’t have to wait. And then when I looked at a few of my classmates who were over 30, so they were entered seminary later in life, one of them, his family wasn’t particularly Catholic. They kind of made it to church on Sundays, but he drifted away from the faith in his 20s and then rediscovered it when he was older. Another one had a divorce in his family and didn’t have much contact with his father. And then another one was raised Catholic. And so you could see that just in that little anecdotal pieces of evidence, how important the influence of the father was. And these are the guys who made it. These are the guys who came back to their faith. So very important to have the fathers of the family involved in a deep way in the formation of their children. And then finally, there’s the office of king. What does that look like within your own family? And we’ve laid the groundwork for this already in our previous discussions. That’s all about responsibility. Being a king is not about being in a super privileged position where you get to take advantage of other people doing things for you. We obviously have as the model of the model king, that would be Jesus who says that whosoever would be greater among you must be the least among all and should be the servant of all. That’s the Christ-like model of leadership. It’s not lording it over people. It’s I’m going to take responsibility for this. I’m going to be a leader, a servant leader. So if you have, let’s say, a domestic church, then what does that domestic church need? It needs a bishop. And so Bishop Folda here in our own diocese, he’s in charge of overseeing the entire diocese and making sure that things are running well. And so in your little domestic church, you’re going to be a little domestic bishop. And that’s going to be your responsibility to oversee things. What your primary role in that is to make sure it becomes your responsibility as father to bring your family to Christ. That’s the main responsibility. And so finally, one last piece that I’d like to explore with you is we’re obviously in this time where we have to practice the social distancing for the common good. And it’s a real adjustment for all of us. All of a sudden, working from home, kids aren’t in school, a lot of stores shut down. And obviously, we’re not having community mass on Sundays. Now when I first started adjusting to this, I looked around the church and I saw everybody was jumping on live streaming the Sunday mass. And I’m a little, I just have some reservations about that. It’s certainly a very understandable way of doing things, but it’s so easy to be able to just watch a mass instead of really participating from the heart. And so that’s why I came up with this Sunday celebrations at home document here to empower the heads of households to be able to do a little prayer service at home. So we’re just going to walk through this here. You lead off with the sign of the cross. You say the confedere as a family. So I confess to Almighty God, Lord have mercy. And then you just do a little liturgy of the word. So I’ve got the readings for the fourth Sunday of Lent here, and certainly plenty of ways to get the readings. And then a Catholic homily, having access to that. And you say the Our Father, you make this read this act of spiritual communion actually written by St. Alphonse’s. His is probably one of the most common ones. And then here’s a formula, a good formula for saying blessing over your children. And then finally the prayer to St. Michael. And so what I think this thing that I’ve come up with is able to do is it gives you an opportunity to take on some of that responsibility as head of your household, to really act out your role as the high priest, the chief priest, and the bishop, let’s say, of your own households. And I think that is probably, in my opinion, the best way that a Catholic family could deal with the situation that we’re in right now. Now obviously, I don’t have the authority to make you do that. Bishop Fulda has said that you still have to have an obligation to observe the Lord’s Day on Sundays. That hasn’t gone away. But he’s left it up to your own conscience as to the way that you’re going to live that out. So it’s not up to me or even Father Phil to tell you what these Sunday celebrations at home are going to look like. So I’m just offering this up as something that I think would be very helpful to you and your families to deal with the situation we’re in. So that’s what I’ve got to talk about this morning. We’ve got, I think, some opportunity to be able to ask questions right now. And so let me just pull up here. We’ve got two waves that you could ask questions today. You can certainly, we’ve got the YouTube chat running right here concurrently with the video. So you can certainly just type those in right now if you’ve got any questions or any discussion that you want to have. Or you could call my office number. Very easy to get a hold of that. Just remember that if you want to call, you need to turn the volume on your live stream down because we are operating on a delay here. And so I’ll sit here for about two or three minutes to see if anybody has any questions. If not, you know, you probably have things you want to get done today. So you could just get back to that. All right. All right. I got a question from Zach here and it is posted already on the on the parish website. The Sunday celebration at home is on the parish website. So I’ll just show you how to navigate there. Open up a new tab here. We’ll go to St. Alphonse’s Langdon.com. So there’s a link we follow today. There’s my face with the YouTube icon over it. And so you just come down past those two things. You click Sunday celebrations at home and that’ll give you we’ve got two guides here. One of them is for the presider and then the other one is for the participant. And so you can just click on these. So this will be it’s basically just like a shorter version of what you have already. You might even find it easier to use to not have all of those things packed in there. So so yeah. So that’s the participant version. And then here we have the presiders version. And if you want the a Word file that you’d be able to modify yourself, you can just send me an email. Here I’ll put my Diocesan email address on. Oops, spell my own name right. So if you would like the the email version, you can just shoot me an email and then I can send that off to you. All right. I’ll give it another 30 seconds for anybody who’s got a question otherwise. You know, I can see on my view that we had a decent number of people watching this. So I know that I’m not screening this. I’m not screening this. I’m not screening this. I’m not screening this. I know that I’m not screaming out into the void. And I’m sure the rest of the men will be able to find this on the parish website. So. And be sure to tune in to how to read the Bible. We’ll go live at 620 tonight and start the program at 630. And asking questions now that I’ve got the YouTube live streams up and running. That’ll be even easier now. Yeah, so. Well, I must have explained myself very clearly because you don’t have a whole ton of questions or discussion. So I hope you found this helpful and just some clarifications as to what looking what being a Christian father in a family would look like. Let us conclude with prayer in the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. At the Savior’s command and formed by divine teaching, we dare to say our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Oh, Mary conceived without sin. Pray for us who have recourse unto the. In the name of the father and of the son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Have a blessed day, everyone.