Praised be Jesus Christ!
 
Today, I’d like to talk about the capital vices of vanity (or vainglory) and envy, and the corresponding virtues that work against them.  Usually people think of vanity as just being obsessed with how we look, and spending an inordinate amount of time in front of the mirror.  But the vice of vanity is best described as “vainglory,” which literally means seeking out “vain glory,” or seeking empty praise from others.  Now it’s important to note here that God has created us for greatness – he has created us for glory!  So in a sense, it is our purpose to strive for good things – to strive to attain glory.  But a vice pertains to having a disordered or inordinate amount of something good.  So vainglory is having an inordinate desire to show our greatness.
 
My first assignment as a priest was to Blessed Sacrament Parish in La Crosse.  While there, I would often go over to visit the grade school students at Blessed Sacrament School.  It was always a great place to go when you were having a bad day.  The little kids would get all excited to see the priest.  They would all wave and say, “Hi Father Burish!” as I would walk through the halls and into their classrooms.  Well, a year or two later when I was teaching high school at Aquinas, and then later at Columbus, needless to say, I didn’t exactly get the same kind of affirming response from students.  If I said hello to a high school student in the hall, sometimes I was lucky if they so much as made eye contact and grunted in response.  I came to see that the energy high confidence booster I received from the grade school kids at Blessed Sacrament was a passing glory – vainglory.
 
How do we work against vanity or vainglory?  We want to try to develop the corresponding virtue of magnanimity, which means “greatness of soul” – desiring greatness or good things because they are great or good – and for the glory of God, rather than just our own glory.  What are, or have been, our goals and ambitions in life?  Have we been motivated more by magnanimity or vainglory?
 
Our next vice is envy.  Envy is a sadness or sorrow for the goods and blessings given to others, insofar as their gifts differ from or surpass our own.  Envy is seen as a perversion or disorder because it “loves” or desires what other people possess, rather than simply loving what is good, beautiful, and true for its own sake.  Envy, it’s believed was the response of Satan to us as humans.  Satan was created by God as an angel – a purely spiritual being.  He rebelled against God and took many other angels with him.  Satan envied us because God sent his Son, not as an angel, but as a man, who took upon himself our human nature. 
 
I often think of the sin of envy in our own lives as a distraction given to us by Satan.  What better way can Satan distract us from accomplishing the work God has given us to do with our own unique gifts and circumstances in life than by getting us to focus solely on what other have – and becoming sorrowful and resentful over it?  We can become so paralyzed by that sorrow and resentment and trying to compete with what others have that we never really become ourselves as God intended us to be.  We may never become aware of what God desires to bring to full fruition within us.
 
How do we work against the vice of envy?  We strive to develop the virtue of fraternal charity.  Fraternal charity (charity or love, being when we desire the good of the other for the other’s sake) is when we have a gratitude for the gifts and talents of others and desire that each and every person reach his or her full potential.  In order to fight or work against this vice, I think it is best to do something concrete by, for example, offering a compliment or word of encouragement to the person toward whom we tend to feel envious.  This works against sadness and our tendency to draw in on ourselves.  Also, we could try to befriend (if they are not a friend already) and learn from that person.  By trying to appreciate their gifts, they can enrich our lives, and we might be able to enrich theirs as well.
 

​Praised be Jesus Christ!
 
As introduced last week, we will now begin exploring the seven capital vices, and their opposite corresponding virtues.  This week we begin with the vice of pride.  Pride is ascribing to ourselves an excellence or greatness that we do not possess; or believing that we are the cause of our own greatness or excellence; or desiring to be singularly great, and despising everyone else who might compete with us.  Pride is, as I said last time, the mother or queen of all the vices.  That’s because before disobedience, it was really pride that led to the fall or sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve.  They desired or thought themselves to be like God, and that led to their disobedience to him.  They did not want to be confined by their limitations as creatures.  In fact, it is being discontent with our status as being created by God that has led to some of the great sins of our society today – such as wanting to control the beginning and the end of human life, wanting to redefine marriage, etc.
 
The thing to keep in mind with pride is that with it comes spiritual blindness – i.e., not seeing ourselves as God sees us.  And that means both the good, as well as our weaknesses and frailties.  We can build up illusions about who we are by busying ourselves with our work or career or school, or our family, even being involved with the Church.  We convince ourselves that we are motivated by a strong work ethic, or good moral values, or even by love for God, when really, we’re just running away from God by running away from ourselves – running away from or hiding from the very things that God wants to root out and heal because we’re afraid to deal with them.  In such cases, we may not really pray, but only stand before the presence of a god we have created ourselves.
 
When our pride is challenged, we try harder and harder to improve our own illusion of holiness or productivity.  One of the symptoms of pride is when we are completely resistant and defensive when we receive any constructive criticism, or are asked to make a change.  Another symptom is when we are very impatient with or completely intolerant of the foibles, sin, weakness, or pride of others – when we hold onto resentments over the ways people have offended or wronged us.  Our pride loves to think: “How could this person have done this to me?!”
 
How do we work against the vice of pride in our life?  Ultimately, as with all the vices, we must allow the Holy Spirit to convict us and we must be touched with the love of Christ, and that will help us to grow and develop pride’s opposite and corresponding virtue: humility.  Humility is seeing ourselves as God sees us: both the good and our weaknesses – having a true opinion of ourselves.  One of the best ways to find greater humility is to ask for it, and to be attentive to resentments that we might be holding onto, our tendency to compare ourselves with others, and our general impatience with others.
 
I think it’s also important to note that when one struggles with a low self-esteem, or insecurity, or a feeling of inferiority that can paralyze them from stepping out of themselves – this is also a manifestation of pride.  It’s not humility because it’s not rooted in a true image of self.  It’s just pride in the other extreme.

​Praised be Jesus Christ!
 
Those of you who are old enough might remember the 1995 movie “Seven” with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman – a detective story about a serial killer who plans murders corresponding to the seven deadly sins.  The seven deadly sins, perhaps more appropriately called the capital vices, have always been a topic of popular interest – hence, the movie, and for a long time I’ve considered addressing them in this column.  Ideally, the very beginning of Lent would’ve been a great time to start, but it didn’t quite work that way.  So, over the next few weeks, I’ll be addressing the seven deadly sins/capital vices.  However, lest we be led to think that our Christian moral life is focused solely on the avoidance of sin and vice, I will also be talking about the virtues and how we grow in them.
 
When we speak of a “sin,” we’re talking about a specific action, word, or thought that is wrong.  However, the word “vice” refers to the habit or disposition/inclination to do what is wrong.  Committing a particular sin again and again leads to having a vice… and, having a vice, we are in the habit of committing a particular sin.  Changing or breaking free from a vice is not an easy thing to do.  It requires conversion of heart, often through prayer and the sacraments, and ultimately growth in virtue.  A virtue is the opposite of a vice in that it is having the habit or disposition to do the good.  Virtues grow in us the more we experience the love that Jesus Christ has for us, which inspires us to change.
 
After I speak about each of the capital vices, I’ll also speak about the virtue we need to develop which works against the particular vice.  These seven vices (or habits of sin) are called “capital” vices because the word “capital” comes from the Latin word “caput,” meaning “head.”  So, each of these seven vices are seen as the head or origin of the other particular vices or sins.
 
The list of seven vices as we know of them today developed over the centuries of our faith as various saints and masters of the spiritual life tried to identify the different weaknesses in the soul that lead us to commit sin.  Over the centuries, that list has changed and varied somewhat.  Sometimes the vice of pride is included in the list of seven, and other times, pride is set aside as the mother of all the vices and the vice of vanity (or vainglory) is put in it’s place.  To complete the list, following those two vices (which are closely related), we have the vices of envy, anger (or wrath), sloth (or laziness), avarice (or greed), gluttony, and lust.
 
These vices are arranged from the most serious to the least serious, and from those that are more spiritual in nature to those that are particularly physical or bodily in nature.  This is because our soul has a higher dignity than our bodies.  Therefore, sins of the soul are ultimately worse than sins of the body.  Contrary to what most people think, sins of lust are not the worst of sins.  They’re just perhaps the most common.
 
Next time, I’ll begin with the mother of all the vices, pride, and its opposite virtue, humility.
 

Praised be Jesus Christ!
 
More Responses to Questions About Parish Merging
 
As a reminder, an important distinction must be made in our use of terminology.  To avoid confusion, we must be careful about how we use the words “church” and “parish.”  For our discussion on merging, when we use the word “parish,” we are referring to the community or group of persons.  In a merger, three parishes would become one parish.  When we use the word “church,” we are referring to the building in which we worship.  As a merged parish, we would maintain our three churches and the original patronal names of those churches.  The newly merged parish community would also take a new name.  If, for example, our newly merged parish was to take as our patronage the Holy Trinity, we would be called Holy Trinity Parish, which has as its places of worship the churches of St. Mary, St. Michael, and St. Kilian.
 
One thing that a lot of people have been worried about is money.  Will parishes lose their money and who will have to pay for what?  Again, we would be one parish community that together possesses and maintains three churches.  To put it as simply as possible, there would be one parish weekend contribution envelope and one “checkbook” or fund that pays for all of our regular operating expenses – heat, lights, snow removal, lawn care, staff payroll, etc. for all three churches – just like each of our parishes do separately right now, but just coming from one combined pot with one envelope rather than three.
 
So what about the rest of the money that still belongs to each of the original parish churches, such as savings accounts, capital improvement project funds, and memorial money?  Those monies would be kept in special restricted accounts to be used only for the improvements of those churches.  And, we would also have a regular capital improvements envelope in which people could designate special donations toward the improvements of a particular church building, or the whole parish if they don’t have a preference. 
 
The important thing to remember is that I, as your pastor, am ultimately responsible for the finances of each of your parishes.  And if you trust me, and the good judgment of those representatives that we have on each of our parish committees and councils, I want to assure you that I will not permit the money that you have contributed to particular things or specific church projects to be lost or given away to someone else.  I’m ultimately responsible, and I’m not going to let financial chaos happen.
 
Finally, many people have asked about being able to vote on the merger.  I’ve stated in a bulletin column a few weeks ago that, generally, all major parish decisions are made by the pastor through consultation with representative bodies such as pastoral and finance councils.  This is because not everyone in the parish is necessarily well informed in the details about how the parish operates and its various needs. In light of that, a simple popular vote that alone determines the merger would not be consistent with how such decisions are made in the Church.  However, we could, following our town hall meetings (which will come sometime in the next several months) do a sort of consultative vote in which the results of the vote help me as the pastor and the committees make a decision about whether or not to petition the bishop for a merger.  In a consultative vote, you would have the opportunity to voice your opinion.  But like I said, that is a ways out, and in the mean time, we want to try to learn as much as we can about the merger, lest we simply reject it as a bad idea.
 
Once again, just a reminder about why we are still pursing this as a possibility: I and our committees so far have good reason to believe that while our parishes have been dwindling over the years, by forming one new and larger community, we will be stronger and more stable together.  There is also more we would be able to do together and more efficiently – with staff and administration, with Religious Education and youth, etc.  It is something through which we can develop a more proactive plan and goals for the future, and be excited and hopeful about, and Lord knows we need that!    

 

​Praised be Jesus Christ!
 
Spring Parish Pilgrimage
 
Last May, many of us enjoyed taking part in the pilgrimage to La Crosse for the Year of Mercy.  This year, I thought we would take another day pilgrimage to the Green Bay area.  On Thursday, May 4th, we will be departing at 7am via coach bus from St. Mary’s in Auburndale to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in Champion, Wisconsin.  Here, over 150 years ago, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to a young Belgian immigrant woman by the name of Adele Brise and instructed her to teach the area children in the faith.  Since then, pilgrims have been coming to this location. 
 
The Catholic Church officially confirmed the Marian apparitions to Adele in 2010, making it the only confirmed place of Marian apparition in the United States.  And in 2016, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops officially designated the grounds as a National Shrine.  After a brief introduction by Shrine staff upon arrival, you will have the chance to visit the apparition site in the crypt of the Shrine Church, as well as walk some of the grounds. Confessions will be available to pilgrims before the 11am Mass at the Shrine.
 
Following Mass, we will depart for a buffet lunch at St. Brendan’s Inn in downtown Green Bay.  At this popular Irish restaurant, you will have the choice between corned beef and cabbage, or Irish Stew.  The meal also includes a salad bar, rolls, seasonal vegetables, dessert, and beverage.  (This will be a hearty lunch buffet, I promise!).  After lunch, we will head just a few blocks away to St. Francis Xavier, the beautiful Cathedral for the Diocese of Green Bay for a guided tour of the church and history museum.
 
Finally, we will head to St. Norbert Abbey in DePere where one of the Norbertine friars will give us a tour of the impressive abbey church.  The abbey’s beautiful modern stained-glass windows were produced by the same artist that made the windows for the Our Lady of Good Help Shrine in Champion.  After our visit to the Abbey, we will return to Auburndale sometime around 6:30pm.
 
Please consider joining us for this pilgrimage!  The cost is $40 per person, including bus transportation and meal.  Please call St. Mary’s Parish Office at 715-652-2806 to register.  Registration is open first to parishioners of St. Michael’s, St. Mary’s, and St. Kilian’s.  After April 1st, if there is still space available, registration will be open to anyone.