Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Homily)
July 03, 2016 9:00 am · Father Jim Blantz
This past week we celebrated the Feasts of St. Peter and St. Paul, and it is a Holy Day of Obligation within the Universal Church. Within the Church, there are 10 days of Holy Days of Obligation, we only have 6 in America and we are doing away with some of those when they come on a weekend and so on. It may be a good thing, but we still need some kind of reminder that we are Catholics, we worship God, because we don't see much encouragement to live a good and holy life by watching television or seeing the actions of our friends and neighbors. So much of our civilization is turning against God these days.
The Days of Obligation were not meant to be a burden. In those days everybody worked 7 days a week, 8 hours a day out in the field. So once a month or so the Church had a Holy Day where they didn't have to go to work. They go to Mass, and they would celebrate each Holy Day as we celebrate Christmas. That is what it was supposed to be. But now as civilization changes, the Holy Days have become a burden, and they are not supposed to be that. In the early Church we had a schism as it were, a fight between 2 factions. The Jewish faction, who wrote Matthew's Gospel, felt you had to become Jewish first. Study the scriptures, the prophets and see that Christ fulfilled the prophecies. You couldn't eat pork, and ham and pickled pigs feet or all those other good things that come from a pig, you had to keep the kosher laws then after a few years then you could accept baptism and become a Christian. Now Paul goes out and converts the hated Romans and Greeks. He gives them a few months of instructions, tells them Christ came and set up a Church, He gave us the sacraments, He opened Heaven, you are now fellow Catholics. This was a great division within the early Church. The Matthew side was great backers of St Peter, the other side was great backers of St. Paul. The two men themselves were on the same page. They didn't want it, but that's how the people turned out.
