Bishop Cordileone's Homily

Another day, another episcopal homily. This one, via Peter Nixon, is the text of today's homily from  the new Bishop of Oakland, Bishop Cordileone at his installation Mass. He begins and ends by quoting Pope Benedict, and in the middle, has this lovely passage which, as Peter notes, uses the image of hospitality in a powerful way:

In God's inscrutable plan, for me this means that, in a sense, I return to where I began. It was close to one-hundred years ago that my grandparents came from Sicily and settled across the bay (before moving down to San Diego some years later), where my grandfather established his fishing trade. Like countless others, they labored under the hardship of immigrants - a new land, with a different language and different customs, struggling to be accepted and to fit in. Yet, somehow they found a welcome, and were able to make a better life for themselves.

 

Of course, much has changed since then. It seems our nation has become a much less welcoming place, even, sometimes, downright inhospitable: unwelcoming to the countless new strangers seeking to come to this land to make a better life for themselves and enrich the lives of us all; unwelcoming toward those who may place a burden on us because they are terminally ill or otherwise "unproductive"; unwelcoming toward those who could be given a chance to prove themselves capable of repentance and rehabilitation for their crimes, and instead eliminating them from society; worst of all, a land that shows itself all too often unwelcoming toward the most defenseless of our brothers and sisters who are not even given a chance to be born, and so are eliminated from society even before they see the light of day. This inhospitality, this hostility, creates a tsunami of moral and physical violence which leaves countless damaged and destroyed lives in its wake - moral and physical violence which, as recent events have tragically shown, hits very close to home here in Oakland.