5 January 2022 – homily for Wednesday after Epiphany – Mark 6:45-52

      Our Gospel today takes place right after Jesus had just performed the multiplication of the loaves and the fish.  Even with this great miracle, the disciples still hadn’t fully figured out what was going on or what their great teacher was trying to teach them.  Afterwards, Jesus performs another miracle: walking on the water toward the disciples in the boat and calming the storm.  Still, there remains a lot of misunderstandings and fear in their minds.  They think that they had just seen a ghost. They just can’t understand what is going on.  It defies their expectations and common sense.

        The saint we celebrate today during this weekday of the Christmas season comes from right here in the United States:  St John Neumann.  He was born in the country of Bohemia in 1811, a country that does not exist anymore, that is part of the Czech republic.  Due to the large number of priests in Bohemia, he decided to travel to the United States to work with the large number of Catholic immigrants that were arriving here.  He attended seminary in New York.  Neumann had a great gift for learning languages, which served him well in the very diverse Catholic Church in the United States.  Although he started as a diocesan priest, he joined the Redemptorist missionary order in the United States, eventually serving as its provincial. In 1848, he became a citizen of the United States.  In 1852, he became the 4th Bishop of Philadelphia.  One of his main accomplishments was to establish a thriving system of parochial schools in his diocese, the first in this country, a legacy that still has a large impact in our American Catholic Church today.  Under his auspices, the schools in his diocese grew in number from 2 to 100.  He is the patron saint of Catholic education. A hard worker, he died of exhaustion at the young age of 49.  Pope Paul VI canonized him in 1977.  We here in the United States can great pride in St John Neumann as one  of the founding Fathers of the Catholic Church in our country.  

     Here is a great quote for St John Neumann about our vocation as Christians: “Everyone who breathes, high and low, educated and ignorant, young and old, man and woman, has a mission, has a work. We are not sent into this world for nothing; we are not born at random… God sees every one of us; he creates every soul, . . . for a purpose. He needs, he deigns to need, every one of us. He has an end for each of us; we are all equal in His sight, and we are placed in our different ranks and stations, not to get what we can out of them for ourselves, but to labor in them for him. As Christ has his work, we too have ours; as He rejoiced to do His work, we must rejoice in ours also.”  What wonderful words upon which we may ponder.  May we unite our prayers with the prayers of St John Neumann today.