TEXT: Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 23, 2024
August 23, 2026 Father De Celles Homily
21st Sunday Ordinary Time
August 23, 2026
Homily by Fr. John De Celles
St. Raymond of Peñafort Catholic Church
Springfield, VA
As many of you know, I was raised in a very devout Catholic home:
We prayed as a family every day;
We talked about the faith a lot, sometimes very intensely.
And we all went to Catholic schools.
But in my late teens and early twenties,
I wandered away from the Church for several years.
I figured the Church didn’t seem to have the answers I was looking for,
or at least the answers I was interested in.
Then when I was about 25, over a period of a few months,
things came together to make me admit that I did believe in God,
and in fact, I did believed God was Jesus Christ.
So, then the question came up: What church would I go to?
Over the years several of my Protestant friends tried to convert me,
inviting me to go to their churches with them, and things like that.
I remember a conversation with one of these well-meaning friends.
I told him there were two reasons I could never be a Protestant.
The first was the Eucharist.
He was confused until I quoted John 6:
“Unless you eat the flesh of the son of man
you do not have life in you.”
Then I quoted the Gospel’s and St. Paul’s record of the Last Supper:
“And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it,
and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body…’”
Not much he could say to that except, “What’s the second reason?”
And so I cited today’s gospel text, Matthew 16:18 and following:
“And so I say to you, you are Peter [which means “Rock”],
and upon this rock I will build my church,
and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;
and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
He started giving me some lame arguments
about how “peter” means “little rock.”
Of course, it doesn’t…it means simply “rock.”
But rather than get into intricacies of the meaning of an ancient Greek word,
I instead stopped him and asked him if he knew who Eliakim was
—whom we read about in today’s first reading.
He didn’t, so I explained to him the direct parallel
between Eliakim and Peter, one that Jesus clearly had in mind.
In the first reading from Isaiah, God says:
“I will place the key of the House of David on Eliakim’s shoulder;
when he opens, no one shall shut, when he shuts, no one shall open.”
Eliakim was the steward placed in charge of running
the house of King David,
and Peter was the steward placed in charge of running
the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
There’s really not much to say after that either.
The Eucharist and Peter, the pope–
how could you be a Christian without those?
And when it comes down to it, the difference between
the Protestant disbelief and the Catholic belief in the Eucharist
is because the popes have insisted that
it is what Jesus said it is:
“This is my body…this is my blood.”
So, in a sense, it comes down to the Pope.
So, when I decided to come back to church,
there was never really a question.
The Church of Jesus was clearly the Catholic Church.
And so I came back, and as time went on, clearly I came back in a big way.
And over the years I’ve brought a few others with me
not due to anything in particular about me, but because
it’s just sort of the nature of the job, as priest.
In the end, over and over, these two things, Peter and the Eucharist,
were so often the things that made the difference.
And usually it began with Peter.
____
I was born in 1960, and so I grew up
during the most turbulent time in modern Church history,
the period right after Vatican II,
coupled with the revolutionary attitude within and without the Church
in the 60’s and 70’s.
And so, as priests and laity alike seemed to be throwing out all the things
I had learned from my parents,
as a young man it seemed to me
that if everything was changing in the Church,
even, it seemed, fundamental beliefs about the Eucharist
and about good and evil,
it just proved the Church had no idea what it was talking about.
What sane person would allow an institution that didn’t know what it believed
to tell him what he had to believe?
Then something remarkable happened.
A new pope came to the chair of Peter,
the man we now know as the great Pope St. John Paul II.
Perhaps it was his years of day to day, person to person, constant struggle
with the atheistic Communist government of his native Poland.
Or maybe his experience as a college professor dealing every day
with the questioning minds of college students.
In any case, he knew what the revolution was about and how to fight it.
And he brought with him one of the greatest minds and teachers
of the 20th century to help him—Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
who he put in charge of defending the doctrine of the Church
and who would later become Pope Benedict XVI.
For 35 years these two men lifted up the voice of the papacy
to speak boldly and clearly
the truth given to the Church by Jesus Himself.
“The Splendor of the Truth” (“Veritatis Splendor”),
as John Paul II would call it.
Not teaching anything new, but taking the keys of the kingdom and
opening up the rich treasury of our faith,
the work of their predecessors of binding and loosening
on earth and heaven.
Hearing this clear teaching, boldly and clearly and beautifully proclaimed,
many of us felt the Church almost literally
settle on the solid rock of Peter.
Of course, many were disappointed—they didn’t want to be on a Rock;
they liked things up in the air, so many left the Church.
But many also returned, like myself.
And many others came to Her for the first time,
drawn to Her by the office of Peter,
recognizing in it a source of unity and clarity of the truth
that Christ intended when He first gave the keys to St. Peter.
Then, of course, after 35 years of these two amazing popes,
a new pope was elected, Pope Francis.
Many of the cardinals thought they were electing
a man in the mold of his immediate predecessors.
I remember, right after the conclave,
one of the very traditional cardinals calling him,
“a Latin-American Ratzinger.”
They were mistaken, misled.
Still, many were drawn to him because of his humility and love for the poor.
Others, sadly, were drawn to him because they thought he would
change many of the very teachings that
John Paul and Benedict articulated so clearly and forcefully.
And now that he is gone, many hope the same from his successor,
Pope Leo.
As if possessing the keys to the kingdom,
the current pope can simply change anything and everything
their predecessors taught, all the way back to Pope Peter.
But they misunderstand the keys.
They are the keys not to the house
of Peter or John Paul, or Francis, or Leo,
but to the house of God.
Peter holds them as the steward, or protector of that House.
He locks this door to keep some treasure safe,
and he unlocks that door to take out and share
the riches of the Church with her children, and the whole world.
But what 2000 years of Popes have clearly taught
—what they have bound and loosed—
cannot be changed by a new pope.
As with Eliakim, what 260 popes
have “open[ed], no one shall shut,”
and what they have “shu[t], no one shall open.”
We have to remember: It’s not about the man, it’s about the office of Peter,
and the teaching of all the Popes.
Yes, some men bring special and unique gifts and talents to the office.
Some are called “saints,” some are called “doctors” of the Church,
and some, very few, are called “the Great.’’
Personally, I believe just as John Paul is now a canonized saint,
one day he will be officially called “the Great.”
And I think Benedict will join him some day as a saint
and that both will, inevitably, be named “doctors.”
While that is amazing and wonderful,
the real miracle and wonder is that for 2000 years
popes have protected the teaching Christ gave to His apostles,
and that, by Christ’s grace, under their stewardship,
sometimes excellent and sometimes not,
the Church has remained a beacon of truth and unity.
All of us from time to time might wish
that this teaching or that teaching would change:
That the particular sin we struggle with
might suddenly no longer be so bad,
or that the mysterious dogmas that so many people can’t understand
would suddenly go away or at least be simplified.
But in the end, as Christ testified before Pontius Pilate,
“For this purpose I have come into the world
—to bear witness to the truth.”
As we move now more deeply into the mystery of this Mass,
into the truth of the Eucharist,
we pray for our current Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV.
We thank the Lord Jesus
that He has given the fullness of the Truth to His Church,
and that He has given us the office of Peter
to defend and hand on that Truth,
so that, built on the Rock of Peter,
even “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”—or us.