2025 Mass of Reparation for Victims and Survivors of Abuse

Saturday of the Fourth Week of Lent

April 5, 2025
St. Philip the Apostle Catholic Church
Flower Mound, Texas

Jeremiah 11:18-20
Psalm 7:2-3, 9b-12
John 7:40-53

The first reading from Jeremiah speaks of corrupt religious and government leaders who hate the truth and collude in plots to destroy and kill the young Jeremiah who is upsetting the status quo by his speaking the truth in fidelity to God’s command. Jeremiah calls all to conversion from their dishonest ways. The plight of Jeremiah foreshadows the coming of Jesus as the Christ who will suffer rejection and death from His own people and the hands of their leadership.

Jesus faced rejection and disbelief because the religious leaders of His time and place decided not to believe Him, preferring to cling to the status quo of their distorted religious culture. Jesus lovingly offered them the path of the light of God’s Truth and Mercy. But they were threatened by Jesus. If they believed Jesus to be telling the truth about God and His own relationship with God as His Son, they would have had to let go of their comfortable positions in society and also the graft that they culled through the corruption of their offices in Temple worship. When they discover that many people believe that Jesus is speaking the truth about God as well as about the corruption of the Pharisees, Scribes, and Priests of the Temple; the religious leaders orchestrate a campaign to discredit Christ by disparaging His character through half-truths and lies. Yet, Jesus remains faithful to the mission entrusted to Him by the Father through His preaching the Truth and calling all to conversion — and He suffers rejection and persecution through the machinations of the elite and of the powerful.

Even the Temple guards who have been sent to intimidate Jesus recognize Jesus’ integrity and the truth that He speaks. They return to the Pharisees without Jesus in captivity, and testify to what He has said, “Never before has anyone spoken like this man.” To which the Pharisees nervously and angrily reply, “Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd, which does not know the law, is accursed.” Yet, even among the Pharisees there exists a man of integrity who would gradually come to the light of the Gospel and believe in Jesus, Nicodemus, who asks with integrity, “Does our law condemn a man before it first hears him and finds out what he is doing?” Nicodemus reverences the truth. The other Pharisees fear exposure from the truth.

We are here today to ask God for conversion of heart within the members of the Church and within society that we might honestly become a people fully alive in the Truth as revealed in Christ. We are here today to make reparation for the sins of bishops, priests, the superiors of consecrated religious men and women, and lay leaders, who actively or passively colluded with abusers who took advantage of their position of power to exploit young people. Such young people, who like Jeremiah were ‘led to slaughter, and had not realized that the authorities were hatching plots against them’ in a conspiracy of silence.

We are here to seek God’s forgiveness and to pray for the healing of those victims and survivors of sexual abuse and the abuse of power. We are here to ask God to instill in our hearts a respect for God’s sacred Law and Truth as displayed by Nicodemus who came to Christ. Finally, and most significantly we are here to offer this Mass in reparation for these sins by which God was justly and grievously offended through the sacrilege of the sacred office of the priesthood and the sacraments by those entrusted with the sacred privilege of ministry and office.

Reparation is a teaching of the Catholic faith connected with the doctrine of atonement and satisfaction for sins committed. We believe as Catholics that human beings are creatures who through the original sin of Adam and Eve fell from an original state of justice and right relationship with God. Adam and Eve were created in this state of original justice. We believe that the disorder of original sin that gravely offends God and for which He justly demanded reparation for the resulting injustice committed against Him and perpetrated by human beings against each other. This debt, owed justly to God by human beings, could never be paid by them because of the power of sin. So, God the Father in His mercy sends His Son who becomes incarnate, truly and fully man as Jesus Christ born of the woman, the Virgin Mary, who pays the debt perfectly as true God and true man through His Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection. We believe that we are redeemed, and this injustice is satisfied only through the Precious Blood of Christ, the Blood of the Lamb, who, as Jeremiah prophesies, is willingly led to slaughter.

Sins, especially sins of sacrilege, are deeply offensive to God because they manifest such disdain for His love and exhibit mockery for His truth, because they prey upon and violate the innocent and the vulnerable who are most dear to God because of their willingness to trust. The sins of sexual abuse by clergy, the coverup by bishops and superiors, the collusion of laymen and women, the violation of sacred trust, require us humbly to place ourselves with contrite hearts for our parts in these sins in the mercy of God fully revealed in Jesus Christ. The annual offering of this Mass of Reparation is a reminder of our constant need for vigilance in our custodial responsibilities for sacred rites of the Church and our dire need to protect the innocent and vulnerable that none will ever be harmed again through the conspiracy of the powerful and the indifference of the elite. The Grace offered by God through the Mass of Reparation enables us to be gravely offended by sins and not to become hardened to their reality by sinful indifference or presumption.

We take refuge in Christ alone, not in policies or programs. We beg for His mercy that He would make us just. We contritely make a firm purpose of amendment, and trust that only through Him can we make amends and experience healing for all who have been harmed by this collusion with evil.