Memorial of St. Josemaría Escrivá 2021

Most Reverend José H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angeles
June 26, 2021

My brothers and sisters in Christ,¹

It is always a special grace for me to be able to celebrate this holy Mass in honor of St. Josemaría Escrivá. And I’m very happy that we are doing it at our Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels. 

Now we are coming out of this pandemic, thanks be to God! And more and more in my prayer, I have become convinced that St. Josemaría is the saint for our times. His charity and spirituality are what we need to heal and rebuild our world after this plague, to love and to sanctify our neighbors and to lift them up to God. 

My brothers and sisters, now, I think it is the time for us to get back to the basics in the Church, the basics in our spiritual life. 

We all need to return to our first love for Jesus Christ, to that simplicity and purity that we had when we first knew that we are children of God, called to be his disciples.  

We need to hear those words of St. Paul today with new ears, with our hearts open to know, in a new way, the spiritual power, the rebirth that is given to us by our Baptism. 

St. Paul tells us today:

“For those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.” 

And again: “You received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, ‘Abba, Father!” 

This is who we are! And this is how much we are loved. And when we know this kind of love, it changes the whole reason for our lives! 

We all recall the story from St. Josemaría. He told us: “As a child I had learned to address God as Father in the Our Father. But to feel, to see, to be astonished at God for wanting us to be his children.” He says: “It was in the street, on a tram, for an hour or an hour and a half. I don’t know,” he says, “how long it lasted. Abba Pater! I felt the need to shout it out loud!”²

That’s the feeling that we need to recover, my dear brothers and sisters. This wonderful understanding that we are children of God. Abba Pater! The beautiful and extraordinary love that God has for each one of us and the urgency that we should have to share God’s love and to spread that love like a fire, to the ends of the earth. 

In the words of St. Josemaría: “I felt the need to shout it out loud!” He is indeed a saint for our times. 

In our Gospel today, we heard the dramatic story of our Lord’s calling of Simon Peter. But of course, this is your story and my story. Our vocation, too, is to follow Christ, to serve him and to work with him in making this world his Kingdom. 

Because the Kingdom of God, is at the end, a kingdom of the heart. And this is how it grows. One soul at a time. Heart speaking to heart. The Kingdom grows by friendship! That’s how it has been since the beginning. 

The first Christians were just eleven apostles and the Blessed Virgin Mary. The world outside was cold and filled with inhumanity and injustice. As St. Paul said in Athens: the people in those times had many gods, they were very “spiritual.” But the living God, the Lord of heaven and earth, remained unknown to them.³

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But our Lord is speaking to us today when he says: “Do not be afraid!” 

How can we ever be worried, how can we get pessimistic, when we have Christ’s own promise to be with us to the end of the age? Yes, persecutions come, difficulties come. They have always come! But Christ goes with us. And we know that in the end, his love conquers. 

So our duty as Christians, as Catholics, is to passionately love the world, as God so loved the world. We believe what we heard in that first reading today, that God created this world in his goodness, and he calls us to “cultivate and care for it.” 

I love these words of St. Josemaría, he said: “Opus Dei is not against anyone. It is not anti-anything. We cannot walk arm in arm with falsehood … but through friendship we must strive to help those who are mistaken to overcome the error of their ways. We must treat them kindly and affectionately.”⁴

This is a beautiful, unique aspect of the spirituality of St. Josemaría that our world needs so desperately. This spirit of friendship, this zeal to bring Christ, “who is the Love of our loves,” to every soul.⁵

And my brothers and sisters, the Kingdom of God grows in our homes, in our families. And it spreads outward from there. We save souls, one friendship at a time. We sanctify the world and offer it back to God, one little act — hidden act of love at a time. 

St. Josemaría would tell us, remember the Acts of the Apostles. They did not try to convert the multitudes. St. Peter spoke to a centurion, St. Philip to the Ethiopian.⁶

And it was the same with Jesus. The Gospel is the story of one soul after another meeting Jesus, and finding in him the true direction for their lives. Think of the woman at the well. Zacchaeus in the sycamore tree.

So Jesus now wants to meet souls through you and through me. He is sending us out, as he has sent his apostles out in every generation.  

So let us go out with the confidence of the children of God. Let us love and stay ever united to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist and in his holy Church. Remember: “All with Peter to Jesus through Mary!”⁷

And let us entrust our lives to the Holy Virgin Mary, Mother of Fair Love. 

May she bestow her blessing on us and help us to widen our hearts and strengthen us for this beautiful task of redeeming the world with her Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

1. Readings: Gen. 2:4b-9, 15; Ps. 2:7-12; Rom. 8:14-17; Luke 5:1-11.

2. In Dialogue with the Lord, 94. 

3. Acts 17.

4. In Dialogue with the Lord, 12.

5. In Love with the Church, 4.

6. In Love with the Church, 15.

7. Christ in Passing By, 139.