Fr. Michael Williams

St Alphonsus Ligouri, the founder of the Redemptorists, once said ‘A man full of self love and self will is a devil in human form’. We could say this was the case in ‘the rich man who used to dress in fine linen and feast magnificently every day’ and totally ignoring the needs of the poor man Lazarus at his gate.

The gospel today strongly and succinctly reminds us, that the way we live our lives here on earth, will determine how we spend eternity.

Tomorrow is the feast of St Vincent de Paul. He was a French priest who founded a religious order concerned with helping the poor in pre-revolutionary Paris. One of the sisters in his order in the nineteenth century, Sr Rosalie Rendu, a Daughter of Charity, who showed great devotion to the poor, told of a dream she had:

‘One night I dreamed that I stood at the judgement seat of God; God received me with great severity and was about to pronounce my sentence when, suddenly, I was surrounded by an immense crowd of people carrying old boots, shoes and hats. They presented all these things to God saying: “She was the one who gave us all these things”. Then Jesus Christ turned to me and said: Because you have given all these second hand clothes in my name, I open heaven to you. Enter for all eternity’.

Another more worrying story I read about recently was the story of a prison chaplain in 1940’s America. Speaking of one particularly hardened criminal who was sentenced to death, Father O\‘Leary said, ‘This man was the most immoral person I had ever come across. His hatred for God, for everything spiritual, defied description’.

Just before his execution, the doctor pleaded with this man to at least kneel down and say the Our Father before the sheriff would come for him. The prisoner spat in the doctor\’s face. When he was strapped into the electric chair, the sheriff said to him, \“If you have something to say, say it now.\” The condemned man started to blaspheme. But then all of a sudden the condemned man stopped, and his eyes became fixed on the corner of the room, and his face turned to one of absolute horror. He screamed. Turning to the sheriff, he then said, \“Sheriff, get me the priest!\” Father O\‘Leary immediately went to the condemned man. The room was cleared of everyone else, and the priest heard the man\’s confession. Later the Sheriff turned to the condemned man and asked, \“Son, what changed your mind?\” The prisoner responded, ‘I was shown my place in Hell, and that\’s when I screamed and called for the priest’.

The Scriptures and these kind of stories from the Church’s history are clear in telling us, that how we care for the sick, the hungry, the strangers, the unborn, will determine our eternal destiny; the scriptures impel us to care for those in need both locally and globally.

The Holy Father reminded us of that last week when he told us: ‘proclaim the coming of the Kingdom, with its promise of hope for the poor and the needy, the sick and the elderly, the unborn and the neglected’. So let’s pray and work to alleviate suffering whenever we encounter it, and so be found worthy to enter eternal life.