Monsignor Michael Morgan’s homily from August 19, 2018

The following is Monsignor Michael Morgan’s homily from the 5:00 pm Mass on August 19, 2018 at the Basilica of Saint Mary. 

In April of 1966 the front cover of Time magazine was plastered with the banner: “God Is Dead” in big black letters. The cover story was about the then-popular theories of all sorts of intellectuals, philosophers, and even so-called theologians that God simply didn’t matter anymore.

The phrase “God is dead” came from a famous German philosopher named Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who died in the year 1900. Back in 1882 he had written a book in which a madman suddenly goes bizerk in a public square and starts ranting: “Where has God gone? We have killed him, you and I. We are all his murderers!” You see, Nietzsche thought that the Age of the Enlightment had made belief in God impossible for the enlightened man. And so the madman in the square shouts: “What are we to do now?” And Nietzsche’s answer was that we must become a race of supermen, because we no longer need God, because now we can shape reality using our own wits, we can set our own moral values and standards now that we’ve gotten rid of God.

Surely, God must have gotten a chuckle out of all of this – it was really nothing new; that’s what the Tower of Babel was all about! But for sure God did not keep laughing when Nietzsche’s philosophy led to totalitarian regimes that ended up killing millions of innocent people. And God continues to shed a tear when in our own day societies try to exclude him from their civic culture, and people behave like God is irrelevant to their lives.

God has known since the beginning of time that we humans, made by him in his image and likeness, need something of the divine to hold on to – something of absolute value to give a moral compass. Otherwise we get the values of the tyrants, or no values at all, or values from the mouths of hypocrites who trash those very values by their deeds.

And this is where the Eucharist comes in and the entire sixth chapter of John’s gospel. This is where Christ inserts himself into all the chaos and trials and tribulations of the world and our own personal lives. This is why the real, physical presence of Christ in our midst is so important. This is why Christ was so insistent that this bread he was to give at the Last Supper is his flesh for the life of the world. Remember those first disciples of Jesus who were walking to Emmaus just after Christ’s crucifixion. They were dejected, defeated and felt empty. They felt like all they believed about Jesus of Nazareth was for nothing, and their whole world had come crashing down. They thought they had nothing of the divine to hold on to.

Today, after the revelations about Archbishop McCarrick and the publication of the Pennsylvania grand jury report, it’s easy to feel that way about the Church. Like the mad man in Nietchez’s book, we feel like yelling: Where is God? Where is the Church? It has been destroyed; what are we to do now? In fairness it has to be said that the Diocese of Arlington has been spared from these horrible occurrences, yet still the bad news affects us all.

But then, at that very lowest moment on the road to Emmaus, Jesus appears and walks with the disciples. And when they stop for a meal and Jesus kind of reenacts the Last Supper for them – then they recognize him in the breaking of the bread, in the Eucharist. And they run and tell the others with great joy, we’ve seen him, Jesus is risen, he is alive – God is not dead.

When we get down and out and have runs of bad luck or depressing days in our lives, when some of the highest and most distinguished members of the Church hierarchy fail us and besmirch their sacred office with sinful lifestyles or gross negligence, that’s the time to draw closer to the Eucharist and to the Church, the time to embrace the Church. Because they are not the Church. The Church is you and me – we are the Body of Christ. Our faith is never in a bishop or a pope or any person, no matter how holy they are – none of them are our redeemers. Our faith is, and always has been, in the person of Jesus Christ and his Church – the Church that he entrusted the Eucharist to. When times get tough, the tough go to church and believe in the Eucharist!

This Emmaus experience was not just a one shot deal 2,000 years ago! We are gathered here today to receive that same Bread of Life that John’s gospel talks about today. In the bread and the wine that are about to be consecrated (by means of Holy Orders and apostolic succession), Christ comes to us in his resurrected and living body just like he did to the disciples on the road to Emmaus. We don’t worship a dead man, we worship the living God and a God of the living who comes to help us and to nourish us in mind and body, even in the midst of all the forces that are trying to bury him and his Church.

And where is Friedrich Nietzsche today and all the tyrants who have tried to bury God or the Church? They are all dead and buried. And what will become of all of those today in the Church who bring disgrace upon their offices and disrepute to the Church? They will end up on the ash heap of history. And where is Jesus Christ? Alive and well and physically present in our Church, in the Eucharist, and in the hearts and minds of millions of Catholics throughout the world who are fed by the Bread of Life every day.

Monsignor Michael Morgan is a priest of the Diocese of St. Augustine and currently serves the Apostolic Nunciature in the United States of America.