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I’m delighted to celebrate Holy Mass this morning here at St. Mary’s, and on this occasion, to install Fr. James Boric as your pastor and as your pastor at St. Michael in Clear Spring. He’s been here, of course, more than a year, and in that time, you have come to know what I know: he is a faithful, singlehearted priest and pastor, or to put it another way, he’s the “real deal.”

So on this day of rejoicing and blessing, let us entrust our cares and worries & weaknesses to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, confident that he knows us and loves us more deeply than we could ever know and love ourselves, confident that he bears our burdens and heals our infirmities and that he lead us, in the power of the Holy Spirit, to the Father of mercies.

You are ministers not of ideas but of realities, the “really real” reality of Christ’s Body broken and his Blood outpoured. Ordination will render you a priest sacramentally, but it is in your life of prayer and virtue that you become priests after Christ’s own heart!

The effects of original sin, and the shattering of unity that comes with it are real. But the mercy of God revealed in Christ has conquered all things, restoring that unity God intended from the foundation of the world.

Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the heart of our Mother, a heart pierced by the sword of sorrow at the suffering of her Son, the heart in which she pondered all the things that God had done and would do through her, the heart of a mother and the heart of a woman. We do well to remember today the importance of that heart in our life.

Be the first witness to the Sacred Heart, to Charity in the flesh, to Charity that is real. When we do this, we reflect a love that comes from God, a God who is real, a God who is among us, a God who loves us with a heart made of flesh.

In this holy shrine where St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s mortal remains lie, on these grounds where America’s first natural-born canonized saint walked, it is right that we should take hold of this great saint’s Eucharistic vision. For from the start of her conversion, the mystery of the Eucharist, the true presence of Christ’s Body and Blood had what I might call “a gravitational pull” on her heart and mind and spirit.