Last Sunday we were happy to welcome to our parish the Little Sisters of the Poor from Palatine, IL. Sister Amy Marie presented to us their mission and spoke about their ministry of care to the elderly that the sisters provide at St. Joseph Home for the elderly. The sisters try to follow what their founder, Saint Jeanne Jugan who died in 1879 often advised: “Be kind, especially to the infirm. Love them well…Oh yes! Be kind.” The sisters invited us to be sensitive to the needs of the sick and elderly and to materially support their work. I would like to remind you, brothers and sisters, that the practice of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy is an additional means that we can receive a plenary indulgence – after all conditions are fulfilled – in the same way as visiting a pilgrimage church. The Vatican indicates, that “the faithful will be able to obtain the Jubilee Indulgence if they visit, for an appropriate amount of time, their brothers and sisters who are in need or in difficulty (the sick, prisoners, lonely elderly people, disabled people…), in a sense making a pilgrimage to Christ present in them.”
This Sunday, February 16, after the 10 am and 11:30 am Masses, there will be an opportunity for those who are sick or elderly to receive the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. This date is not accidental since on February 11, which is the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, every year the Catholic Church celebrates the World Day of the Sick. In a special letter, Pope Francis encourages us to encounter Jesus in the sick and to see sickness as an occasion for a transformative encounter:
“When Jesus sent the seventy-two disciples out on mission, he told them to proclaim to the sick: ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ He asks them, in other words, to help the sick to see their infirmity, however painful and incomprehensible it may be, as an opportunity to encounter the Lord. In times of illness, we sense our human frailty on the physical, psychological and spiritual levels. Yet we also experience the closeness and compassion of God, who, in Jesus, shared in our human suffering. God does not abandon us and often amazes us by granting us a strength that we never expected and would never have found on our own.
“Sickness, then, becomes an occasion for a transformative encounter, the discovery of a solid rock to which we can hold fast amid the tempests of life, an experience that, even at great cost, makes us all the stronger because it teaches us that we are not alone. Suffering always brings with it a mysterious promise of salvation, for it makes us experience the closeness and reality of God’s consoling presence. In this way, we come to know “the fullness of the Gospel with all its promise and life.”
Fr. Mark Jurzyk