July 2025 – Tony Lusvardi, S.J.

Bargaining with God? Homily for the 17th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)

Guido Reni, *Trinity of the Pilgrims* (1625-6)

Readings: Gn 18:20-32; Col 2:12-14; Lk 11:1-13

A few weeks ago, some friends were talking about watching a movie. They knew that it took a dark twist at the end, so they hit the stop button early to avoid the tragic finish. That’s exactly what happens in today’s first reading. The wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah becomes too great for God to ignore, and he decides to destroy the cities. Abraham questions him, as if bargaining him down. If just ten innocent people remain, God will spare the cities. But, as you probably know, if you read on, God does destroy the cities. They did not contain even ten good men. They were corrupt from top to bottom.

Still, it’s not an accident that today’s reading stops where it does. The premature ending focuses our attention on God’s reaction to human corruption. He is not eager for destruction or motived by vindictiveness. To use the terms of later Christian theology, we could say that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the many stories in the Book of Genesis that express the reality of Original Sin. The Biblical message is clear: None of us is innocent. Mankind is corrupt from top to bottom. God’s reaction to Abraham—his desire to spare the innocent—shows that the destruction wrought by Original Sin is not what God wants. Our sinfulness is self-destructive.

If self-destruction were the end of the movie, we could understand turning it off early. But God’s full response to human sinfulness, which unfolds in the New Testament, is not to strike a deal, to plea bargain, or to negotiate. Nor is it to ignore our sinfulness or to excuse it. It is not to declare a new paradigm in which there are no longer any moral absolutes and what was once sinful is now OK, if circumstances are right or you get your pastor’s permission. No, God’s reaction is something else entirely. As St. Paul tells the Colossians, God has removed sinfulness from our midst by “nailing it to the cross.”

Is the Great Gatsby the Great American Novel?

The dome of the Cathedral of St. Paul from Summit Avenue, not far from where F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up.

As an undergraduate, I was an English major, so it was a real treat for me to have the chance to reread one the classics of American literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby this spring. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the novel’s publishing. My essay to mark the occasion recently appeared in Law & Liberty, and you can check it out here. The occasion prompted me to dig up another essay I wrote several years ago about “Benediction,” one of Fitzgerald’s few stories with an explicitly Catholic theme (check it out here).

As much as any other book, I think, Gatsby can stake a claim to be the Great American Novel, in part because the novel itself grapples with the question of what it really means to be “great.” Equally important, it wrestles with the nature of the American character. It is an elegantly slim novel but, as I realized while writing and rewriting my reflection on it and still feeling like I couldn’t quite do it justice, it is taut with beauty, irony, and subtle meaning.

Celebrating St. Kateri in South Dakota

July 14 is an important day for Native American Catholics: the feast day of St. Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680). St. Kateri’s life was characterized by courage and fidelity in the face of great suffering. She lost her parents to a smallpox epidemic as a girl, and the disease left her scarred for life and with damaged eyesight. At twenty, she converted to Catholicism and, as happens to many converts, suffered hostility for doing so. But she lived an exemplary life as a Christian, dedicating herself to caring for the sick and elderly, prayer, and devotion to the Eucharist.

In 2012, Kateri Tekakwitha, the “Lily of the Mohawks,” became the first canonized saint to hail from one of the Native tribes of North America. Her canonization by Pope Benedict XVI coincided with my time working on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, a deeply formative experience in my own life as a Jesuit. I knew many Lakota Catholics who had spent years praying for Kateri’s canonization, and it was a joy to be with them when the day finally came. I remember very well the beautiful Mass we celebrated in St. Charles Borromeo Church on St. Francis Mission — and the feast that followed.

St. Charles Church was recently the subject of a news segment produced by South Dakota Public Broadcasting. It is a remarkably beautiful church–recognizable on the plains for its distinctive purple color. First-time visitors stepping inside often remark on how they never expected to find such a treasure on the prairie. Its combination of Lakota art with traditional church architecture is, in my opinion, a terrific example of successful inculturation.

I was delighted when I watched the SDPB segment to see it narrated by Deacon Ben Black Bear, an expert in Lakota language and culture and a man of deep faith and spiritual insight with whom I had the honor of working on Rosebud.

If you’re looking for a way to celebrate the memorial of this great and humble saint, spend a couple of minutes watching Deacon Ben describe St. Charles Borromeo Church here:

And if you’re anywhere between Murdo, South Dakota and Valentine, Nebraska, take a detour to check out this gem of a church in person!

If you haven’t already done so, consider subscribing to this blog:

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jesuit story

2025 represents the 100 year anniversary of a book that, as much as any other, has a claim to be called the Great American Novel — F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Revisiting the book this year, I came upon something I wrote on the blog Whosoever Desires back in 2011 about one of Fitzgerald’s few explicitly Catholic stories “Benediction.” I thought I’d share it here. This weekend, I’ll have something at Law & Liberty about Gatsby.

I have long thought F. Scott Fitzgerald to be a very Catholic writer, though explicitly Catholic themes show up only rarely in his work. There’s the urbane Monsignor Darcy in This Side of Paradise, for example, and a few scattered references in Tender is the Night, but mostly Fitzgerald’s Catholic sensibilities come through in his moral vision, in the interplay of truth and illusion we see, for example, in The Great Gatsby.

In a Fitzgerald biography, however, I’d once come upon a reference to an early (1920) short story called “Benediction,” and I took advantage of a Chicago snow day last week to track the story down. I was not disappointed.

The story is a gem, written in the witty, dancing prose of the youthful Fitzgerald, and touching on many of his typical themes—the giddiness of coming of age, the wistful sadness of romance, even a hint at class sensitivities. The story centers around Lois, a romantic and beautiful nineteen-year-old travelling to Baltimore to meet her lover, Howard; on her way to their rendezvous she stops to visit her only brother Keith, a seminarian she has not seen in seventeen years.

Fitzgerald’s description of the seminarians spilling out onto the lawn after class like “a swarm of black human leaves” carrying thick volumes of Kant and Aquinas is typical of his lapidary prose—and hints at the identity of the crowd that Keith has gotten himself involved with:

There were many Americans and some Irish and some tough Irish and a few French, and several Italians and Poles, and they walked informally arm in arm with each other in twos and threes or in long rows, almost universally distinguished by the straight mouth and the considerable chin—for this was the Society of Jesus, founded in Spain five hundred years before by a tough-minded soldier who trained men to hold a breach or a salon, preach a sermon or write a treaty, and do it and not argue…

Keith, whom Lois remembers chiefly from the picture of a skinny teenager their mother keeps on her bureau, turns out to be a true brother—understanding, kind, insightful, sympathetic, confident. Lois describes him as “sweet.” He recounts his vocation story with slight dissatisfaction, feeling, as one often does when telling one’s vocation story, that something inexpressible—the most important thing—has been left out.

In Keith and his fellow Jesuits, Lois encounters something she recognizes as beautiful and weighty—and different. What is more, Lois, a Catholic herself, though by her own description a “lukewarm” one, seems to realize that this different something around which her brother’s life revolves makes a claim on her too.