The Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time – November 6, 2022

(2 Maccabees 7:9) You accursed fiend, you are depriving us of this present life, but the King of the world will raise us up to live again forever.  It is for his laws that we are dying.
(Thessalonians 2:16-17) Brothers and Sisters:  May our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and God our Father, who has loved us and given us everlasting encouragement and good hope through his grace, encourage your hearts and strengthen them in every good deed and word.
(Luke 20:38) He is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to Him all are alive.

Dear Parishioners and Friends,

As we celebrate Veterans’ Day this coming week let us give thanks for all the men and women, who have faithfully served our country since its beginning.  My grandfather, father, and uncles were all veterans.  My paternal grandfather served in World War I in France.  I will always remember the one Christmas, probably 1967, when he recalled the Christmas of 1917, which he spent in the trenches.  Those who have read about trench warfare know what a frightening, filthy, de-humanizing situation the men found themselves in.  Yet they fought on to make the world “safe for democracy.”  My grandfather was grateful to come back home, get married, and start a family, which he did. 

My father and uncles were also veterans.  My father and two of his brothers fought in World War II, one in the Navy and two in the Air Force.  His younger brother was in Korea.  Dad had graduated from High School in 1939 and had begun his life’s work in a laboratory, hoping one day to enter the field of chemistry.  Suddenly, all plans were put on hold when the war began for the United States on December 7, 1941 – Pearl Harbor Day.   Shortly afterwards he enlisted in the Air Force.  Once he told my uncle Greg, also in the Air Force, that if he would survive the war, he would marry my mother and start a family, which he did; and thus the reason that I am able to write this little reflection. 

Dad never spoke much of the war. That often is the attitude of veterans. He was a navigator on many bombing missions.  He didn’t think war was something to glamorize.  He surely was happy to have five children and later grandchildren as a countersign to the death of war.  Every Sunday in my youth I was proud to kneel next to him, a grateful heart, at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  Later, he shared with me the little prayer book he used called the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, which I treasure almost sixty years later.   He was a proud veteran as well as a faithful Catholic.  Once he even taught me how to sing “It’s a Grand Old Flag” for a school program. I can still sing it, but now rarely in public. At his graveside, on the day of his burial, I will always remember the bugler playing taps and the gun salute and then the solemn folding of the flag which draped the coffin and its presentation to the family by a decorated military chaplain, a friend of the family. I could write at length of the Catholic military chaplains I have known over the years, but I will save that for another time.   May we be worthy of our veterans’ sacrifices as we strive to be faithful citizens, patriots, and Catholics.  

Once my father took from his wallet a worn Sacred Heart Badge, that my mother had given to him before he went to war, for me to see.   He claimed that the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus had protected him throughout the war and throughout his entire life. He had a very close call during one engagement with the enemy in the sky, for which he received the Purple Heart medal.  He and my mother were careful to make over and over again the nine First Fridays.  My father and mother loved to sing the old hymn: “Heart of Jesus meek and mild.”  After my father died at the age of 82, I looked into his wallet and there was that same badge, a sign of my father’s consecration to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus from this world into eternity.

 Please forgive me for sharing these personal experiences.  I hope they do a little good. 

God bless our veterans! Thank you for your generous service to this grand country. For those who have died, may they rest in peace! Most Sacred Heart of Jesus!  Have mercy on us! God bless America!

Yours in the Immaculate Heart of Mary and in the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus,

Fr. Mark G. Mazza, Pastor