Black History Month Mass / 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2025

 
Most Reverend José H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles
 
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels
February 15, 2025
 
My brothers and sisters in Christ,^[1]
 
It’s always a joy and privilege to get together for this celebration of Mass on this Black History Month.
 
As I was saying today, we especially remember in our prayers, the victims of the wildfires — in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
 
And I would say we should especially do it for the people in Altadena, which is an historic landmark in the struggle for Black civil rights in California and the nation.
 
As we know, Altadena was one of the first places where African American families could buy a home in California, and now we are saddened by the loss of so many of those homes in the wildfires.
 
We pray for them, we pledge our support to all of them to rebuild.
 
And I think today especially, we ask the intercession of the holy men and women who make up our Black Catholic communion of saints: the Venerables Pierre Toussant, Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange, Sister Henriette Delille, Father Augustus Tolton, and the Servants of God Julia Greeley and Sister Thea Bowman.^[2]
 
It is a special moment to go to their intercession, for all of us in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
 
And then when we turn to the Gospel for today’s Mass, it’s interesting because we find Jesus opening his heart to tell us the secret of life, the secret of happiness.
He tells his disciples: “Rejoice and live for joy on that day. Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.”
 
But as we were listening to the Gospel, it’s interesting to hear that he doesn’t say what we might be expecting to hear.
 
He tells them and us: “Blessed are you who are poor … Blessed are you who are now hungry …Blessed are you who are now weeping … Blessed are you when people hate you.”
 
It’s difficult to understand that, because as we know, our world gives us a very different vision of happiness.  
 
Our world tells us that happiness comes from having power and wealth, from pleasure and popularity. This is, as we know, the theme of most of the advertising and entertainment in our culture.
 
But Jesus is telling us tonight that the world’s idea of happiness is not real, it’s an illusion.
 
He says: “But woe to you who are rich … Woe to you who are filled now … Woe to you who laugh now … Woe to you when all speak well of you.”

 It’s interesting, isn’t it?
 
My brothers and sisters: We all want to lead a happy life, that’s what every human heart is longing for and looking for.
 
That’s how God made us. We are all born with this desire for happiness. God puts the desire for happiness in our hearts in order to lead us to himself.
 
And the saints teach us that “God alone satisfies.”^[3]
 
That’s what Jesus is telling us in today’s passage of the Gospel.
 
Jesus is teaching us that we need to have hearts that long for God alone, hearts that seek only him, hearts that know that what we are looking for in life — and that can be found only in God.
 
We will never be satisfied, never be truly happy, if we do not have God in our lives.
 
Jesus is telling us tonight that if we want to find God, we need to be “poor in spirit,” to live with detachment from material things.
 
To follow Jesus, we need to have a simple lifestyle, not worrying too much about ourselves and our comforts. One of the saints, I think it’s very interesting, he said: “Don’t create needs for yourself.” That’s great advice.^[4] Because we all tend to do that, we think too much about ourselves as — what is it that I want?
 
Jesus wants us to put our trust in him, and him alone. That’s what the prophet Jeremiah tells us also in the first reading. As we heard: “Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is in the Lord.”
 
So he is calling us to recognize that everything we have, including our life itself, is a gift that comes from the loving hand of God.
 
God loves each one of us personally, in an amazing way.
 
So the path that Our Lord sets out before us is a beautiful way to live. But he warns us that following him will not be easy.
 
He says that when we face hostility for living our faith in his Gospel, we should rejoice and be glad. For our reward will be great in heaven!
 
My brothers and sisters, heaven is our true home, heaven is the destination of all our efforts!
 
So we need to live our lives on earth in a way that leads us there. As we all are trying to do.
 
And we need to make Jesus our model. In all things, we should be learning from Jesus every day. From his words, from his example.
 
This is how the Black Catholic saints lived. I was thinking recently of Venerable Henriette Delille.
 
As we know, she was a descendant of slaves, she made herself a servant of the poor, a servant to the sick, the elderly, and the lonely. She had a beautiful attitude of total trust in God.
 
And I’m sure that many of you know her beautiful prayer: “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I want to live and die for God.”  What a beautiful example she gave, and what a beautiful prayer.
 
So as we try to see what is it we can do in order to really center our life in the love of God and the love for others. We need to look at examples like her example.
 
And we need to ask for that grace to be really happy of listening to God, of helping other people to discover the beautiful of God’s love for us.
 
So today, let us ask her for her intercession, that we might have that same spirit, that same attitude of trust: “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I want to live and die for God.”
 
And let’s us ask Mary, our Blessed Mother to help us as we continue to follow in the footsteps of her Son, trusting in his love and striving every day to be more like him.