From Archbishop Donoghue

Dedication of New School and Chapel
October 28, 1998
Pinecrest Academy
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Feast of Sts. Simon and Jude

Dear Parents, Teachers, all my young Friends enrolled at Pinecrest Academy, and all our Friends in Christ,

The usual way for us to find out how to do something well, is to study it ahead of time. If we need to fix something, something that’s not working right, then we look for the instruction manual, and then we look up and find the answer to the problem. Or if we have to give a report on something, or write a paper, we might look up our subject in the encyclopedia, and read all about it before we give our own version. And of course, going to school is just a big version of the same thing - Before we go out into the world, before we actually grow up and have to do all the things that grown-ups have to do, we have to go to school and learn all the basics that you need to get along in the world - the math, the grammar, the history, languages, and on and on - I don’t have to tell you how much there is to learn, because I am sure that your teachers remind you of that every day. And so, if we think about it, we see that for human beings, almost always before we want to do something well, we study up on it, we learn the details, and when we think we know enough, then we try to do it on our own.

But when we talk about believing in God, and when we talk about being good men and women, good boys and girls, then the whole thing is turned around. Oh sure - there are many books written about how to be good - about how to believe in God - but all the reading and studying about good people and the good works they have done won’t mean a thing unless there is something special in you to begin with. And for us, for Catholics, and for anyone who truly believes that God will save them, that something special that you must have in you before you can learn anything else is the Spirit of Christ. We have to try and make sure, before anything else that is in our minds and our hearts, that there is the feeling and the knowing that when we were baptized, the Holy Spirit came into us and made us ready to receive all the goodness that God wants us to have in our hearts.

So you see - it is very different from the usual things we do - with them, we open the book to find the facts about what we want to do. But with religion, with what we call faith and believing, we believe in God first - we get ourselves right with Him before anything else, and then all the rest follows. You know, we heard this story in the Gospel today about Jesus choosing the men who He wanted to be His Apostles, His first bishops - sort of like the first executive board of the Church that He was building. And if you look at the Gospel of St. Luke to see what happens right after He chose these men, you will read about the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus went with the Apostles to the top of a great hill, and there, before Him, thousands of people gathered to hear what He had to say, what He had to teach them, about how to be holy during this life, and how to become worthy for the life that will come after we die. These are the famous beatitudes, and throughout your whole life, you will hear them said over and over - Blessed are the merciful, Blessed are the peacemakers, Blessed are the pure in heart, and so forth.

But before Jesus taught these wonderful sayings to the Apostles and to the People, St. Luke tells us that many sick people, and even crazy people, came to the Lord so that He could heal them, and make them well, and make them ready to receive the words that He was getting ready to teach them. And the very are that

Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all.

Today we are dedicating your new school, and in that school, at its very heart is a chapel, and in that chapel from now on will be living the same Jesus who we read about in the Gospel. And it is the same now, as it was then - before we grow up and go out into the world, before we open all those books that are going to teach us all those lessons about living, before we learn anything, in fact, that is worth learning about this world and about all the people in it, we have to go, like the Apostles and like all those people who went out to hear Jesus that day, we have to go before Him and let His power come over us - because His power, the power of His Spirit will heal us and make us strong - it will make us ready to deal with all the rest - to deal with all the stuff we have to learn, and all the problems and challenges that we have to meet, as we grow up, as we grow older, and as we get nearer and nearer to seeing Jesus face to face.

So let us put first things first, as they say, and before we learn one more thing, before we open one more book, before we go to one more class, let us make a promise at this Mass, and never go back on it, from this moment on - let us promise always to come and visit Jesus in the Chapel, to read His holy words in the Gospel, and to receive His Body in Holy Communion as often as we can - and let us promise at the same time, that before we try to do anything, anything at all, that we will ask God for His help, and try to do His will, - and then all that follows will be automatically good, and nothing at all for us to worry about. For God will touch us, as Jesus touched all those people that day, and we will be healed of whatever ails, whatever troubles us, and we will understand completely, what we should do next.

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GOSPEL: St. Luke 6: 12 - 19

In those days he departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God.

When day came, he called his disciples to himself, and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named apostles:

Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called a Zealot, and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

And he came down with them and stood on a stretch of level ground. A great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and even those who were tormented by unclean spirits were cured.

Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all.