Installation of Bishop Matthew Elshoff as Episcopal Vicar - Our Lady of the Angels Region

Most Reverend José H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles

St. John Chrysostom Catholic Church
Los Angeles, California
October 29, 2023

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,¹

It is a joy to be with you for this important moment in the life of the family of God, as we install our brother, Bishop Matthew Elshoff, as episcopal vicar for the Our Lady of the Angels Pastoral Region of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

And it is fitting that we are worshiping today in this beautiful church dedicated to St. John Chrysostom, who was a great bishop and a doctor of the Church.

Every bishop is chosen by Jesus and anointed to proclaim his love and to lead all souls into his loving arms and tender embrace.

We worship a God who has revealed that he is Love! A God who humbled himself out of love to share in our humanity, and to show us the way to love him. To know God’s love is the destiny of all humanity and the destiny of every soul.

That’s what Jesus is talking about in the Gospel today. Let’s listen to his words again:

“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

My brothers and sisters, we are made for love.

The Servant of God Dorothy Day once said, “What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and to be loved, to know love in our families, in our world, and in all our relationships?”²

And we see this longing for love expressed everywhere in our popular culture. It is the great theme of our movies, television, and songs.
That is what people are searching for online.

But so many of our neighbors are lost and misled, they’re looking for love in places where it can never be found; they’re filling up their lives with false substitutes for love.

St. Thomas Aquinas said long ago, “God alone satisfies.”

This is still true, and it will always be true. God places the desire for love in our hearts in order to lead us to himself.³

That’s what Jesus is talking about today in the Gospel.

When Jesus commands us to love God and love our neighbor, he is giving us a roadmap. He is showing us the way to follow to discover God and find love.

And Jesus is saying today that he himself is the way! Your beautiful duty, Bishop Matt, is to proclaim this truth. The people of our time long to hear this good news of God’s love.

In this time when so many are confused and deluded about what makes for true happiness; when so many are anxious and troubled by the state of the world; with wars and persecutions, hostilities and great uncertainties about the future — we know the truth: God alone satisfies. Jesus alone is the way.

And dear brothers and sisters, in these times, “the Word of the Lord” must “sound forth” from every one of us in the Church, just as St. Paul says in today’s second reading.

People need to hear again that God is real, that he is living and that his love for us is true. They need to know that he raised Jesus from the dead and that he longs to raise all of us up with him.

All of us in the Church are called to love our neighbors and proclaim to them that Jesus is alive, and that in his friendship we can find true happiness and a love that never ends!

Bishop Matt, Jesus is calling you now to lead us in this mission of love.

I hope you will always remember that a bishop does not have to be an expert in politics or current events or the media.

A bishop needs only to be a man who is convinced that he has been loved and saved by Jesus, and a man who longs, with all his heart, to bring that love and salvation to everyone.

So that is my prayer for you. May you be, as St. Paul says today, an “imitator … of the Lord” and “a model for all the believers.”

And brothers and sisters, as we pray for our new bishop, let us renew our own desire to love Jesus as he has loved us, and to make his love known to the ends of the earth.

My brothers and sisters, we pray for Bishop Matt today!

We ask St. John Chrysostom to inspire him. And we ask Holy Mary, Queen of the Apostles, to wrap him and all of us in the mantle of her fair love!