Today is the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost. The letter killeth<\/strong>, but the spirit quickeneth\u2014that is today’s Epistle, and today’s Gospel is two men who knew the law perfectly walking past a person bleeding to death on a road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Confiteor and Kyrie are said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We begin the way the Church has always begun\u2014not with achievement, but with an honest accounting. Before anything else in this Mass proceeds, each of us names what we have done and left undone, and asks the mercy of God and of one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take the pause. Nobody here is required to have arrived clean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Gloria is said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n And then, immediately after the honesty, praise. That order is deliberate and it never changes: we tell the truth about ourselves first, and the glory comes after, not as a reward for having been good but because God is worth praising regardless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Ps. 69:2-3, 69:4)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Deign, O God, to rescue me; O Lord, make haste to help me. Let them be put to shame and confounded who seek my life. Let them be turned back in disgrace, who desire my ruin. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almighty and merciful God, by Whose grace Your faithful people serve You worthily and righteously, grant, we beseech You, that we may hasten without stumbling to those things You have promised us. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, world without end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Collect for St. Joachim, Father of the Blessed Virgin Mary)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n O God, Who, in preference to Your other Saints, willed St. Joachim to be the father of Your Son’s Mother; grant, we beseech You, that we may ever enjoy the spiritual help of him whose feast we celebrate. Through the same Christ our Lord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2 Corinthians 3:4-9<\/a>, Douay-Rheims<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Brethren, such confidence we have, through Christ, towards God. Not that we are sufficient to think any thing of ourselves, as of ourselves: but our sufficiency is from God. Who also hath made us fit ministers of the new testament, not in the letter, but in the spirit. For the letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now if the ministration of death, engraven with letters upon stones, was glorious; so that the children of Israel could not steadfastly behold the face of Moses, for the glory of his countenance, which is made void: how shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather in glory? For if the ministration of condemnation be glory, much more the ministration of justice aboundeth in glory.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (Ps. 33:2-3)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall be ever in my mouth. \u2123. Let my soul glory in the Lord; the lowly will hear and be glad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Ps. 87:2)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Alleluia, alleluia. \u2123. O Lord, the God of my salvation, by day I cry out, at night I clamor in Your presence. Alleluia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Luke 10:23-37<\/a>, Douay-Rheims<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n At that time, turning to His disciples, Jesus said: “Blessed are the eyes that see the things which you see. For I say to you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see the things that you see, and have not seen them; and to hear the things that you hear, and have not heard them.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n And behold a certain lawyer stood up, tempting Him, and saying: “Master, what must I do to possess eternal life?” But He said to him: “What is written in the law? how readest thou?” He answering, said: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind: and thy neighbour as thyself.” And He said to him: “Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But he willing to justify himself, said to Jesus: “And who is my neighbour?” And Jesus answering, said: “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among robbers, who also stripped him, and having wounded him went away, leaving him half dead. And it chanced, that a certain priest went down the same way: and seeing him, passed by. In like manner also a Levite, when he was near the place and saw him, passed by.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n “But a certain Samaritan being on his journey, came near him; and seeing him, was moved with compassion. And going up to him, bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine: and setting him upon his own beast, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two pence, and gave to the host, and said: Take care of him; and whatsoever thou shalt spend over and above, I, at my return, will repay thee.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n “Which of these three, in thy opinion, was neighbour to him that fell among the robbers?” But he said: “He that shewed mercy to him.” And Jesus said to him: “Go, and do thou in like manner.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Nicene Creed is said here, from the Missal.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We say it together, as the Church has said it since the fourth century\u2014not as a test anyone has to pass at the door, but as the family’s own account of what it holds. If you cannot say all of it yet, say the part you can. Nobody is checking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The letter killeth<\/strong>, but the spirit quickeneth. Paul writes it flatly, in the middle of a passage about ministry, and then the Gospel puts it on a road and lets us watch it happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Start with the lawyer, because he is not a villain and it matters that he isn’t. He asks a real question about eternal life, and Christ throws it straight back: what is written in the law? how readest thou?<\/em> Notice that second half. Not only what does it say\u2014how do you read it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The man answers perfectly. Love God entirely, love your neighbour as yourself. He knows the material. And Jesus tells him so: thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Then comes the sentence that turns the whole passage. But he, willing to justify himself, said: and who is my neighbour?<\/em> He has the right answer and he wants a boundary drawn around it. Not because he’s wicked\u2014because a category is so much easier to satisfy than a person. This is the first place the letter killeth<\/strong> in this Gospel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That instinct is where the letter killeth<\/strong>. The letter is what lets you hold the correct answer and still ask who’s excluded from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So Christ tells a story instead of giving a definition. A man going down to Jericho is robbed, stripped, beaten, and left half dead. He has no name, no tribe given, no occupation, no religion stated. The text strips him of every category the lawyer might have used to sort him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is not an accident of the storytelling. Lying in the road, he is simply a human being in a bad state, and the entire question of who owes him anything has to be answered without a single label to go on. Strip the labels away and the letter killeth<\/strong> loses its grip immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A priest comes down the same road. He sees him. He passes by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Levite comes to the place. He sees him. He passes by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The parable gives no reason for either man, and I want to be careful not to invent one. What the text does give us is who they were: the two classes of men in that society whose whole working life was the careful keeping of the law. Christ could have made the passers-by anybody. He made them the professionals. When the letter killeth<\/strong>, this is who it kills through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that is the Epistle, dramatized. The letter killeth.<\/strong> Not because the law was bad\u2014Paul says the ministration engraved on stone came with glory<\/em>\u2014but because a law held as letter can be kept perfectly by a man who is walking away from someone bleeding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then a Samaritan. To that first audience this is the wrong person entirely: wrong bloodline, wrong worship, wrong temple on the wrong mountain, a man a respectable listener would have been taught to avoid. He is the outsider in the story, and Christ hands him the mercy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seeing him, was moved with compassion.<\/em> Same verb the parable used for the other two\u2014all three of them saw. Sight was never the variable. What the Samaritan did with what he saw is the variable. Three men read the same road; for two of them the letter killeth<\/strong> on the spot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Look at what he actually does, because the parable slows down here and lists it. He goes to him. He binds the wounds. He pours in oil and wine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He puts the man on his own animal, which means the Samaritan is now walking. He brings him to an inn and takes care of him overnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then the detail almost everyone forgets. The next day he took out two pence, and gave to the host: take care of him; and whatsoever thou shalt spend over and above, I, at my return, will repay thee.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n He pays. He commits to an open-ended bill on a stranger he will probably never see again. This is not a warm feeling in the moment\u2014it’s a feeling that survived contact with a cost, which is the only kind that counts for anything. Wherever the letter killeth<\/strong>, it is usually because nobody was willing to be billed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is what the spirit quickeneth looks like in practice. Not a softer standard than the law. A far more expensive one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then Christ closes the trap the lawyer set for himself. The question was who is my neighbour<\/em>\u2014who qualifies, where’s the line. Christ asks: which of these three was neighbour to him that fell among the robbers?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n He moves the word from a category to an action. Neighbour stops being a class of people you owe something to and becomes something you either do or don’t do. And the lawyer, to his credit, answers correctly again\u2014he that shewed mercy<\/em>\u2014and gets the only instruction in the passage: go, and do thou in like manner.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nothing about who deserved it. The instruction is entirely about conduct. That single move is the antidote to everything the letter killeth<\/strong> does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the test Bloom keeps returning to: any teaching, any rule, any institution should be tested by its fruit and not its letterhead<\/span>. Take today’s parable as the test case and ask what the rule produced on that particular road. Two men kept something. One man was left bleeding. That is the fruit, and it is the whole verdict\u2014and it is exactly how the letter killeth<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to be honest about where this lands, because our own tradition has failed this exact test in public and repeatedly. Christianity’s record includes a great many people who could recite the second commandment flawlessly and still crossed to the other side of the road\u2014from people who were poor, from people who were sick, from people whose lives didn’t fit the diagram. That is not an attack from outside the faith. It is the faith’s own Gospel, read on its own Sunday, saying plainly that the letter killeth<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it names something for anyone here who has been the person in the road. If you have been stepped over by people who were, by every visible measure, extremely religious\u2014you were not imagining it, and the Gospel is not on their side in that memory. The letter killeth.<\/strong> Christ said so first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now hold the other half, because Paul is not telling us to throw the law out and neither is the Gospel. The Samaritan does not improvise a new ethic. He does exactly what the law already said\u2014love your neighbour as yourself\u2014and he does it without asking first whether this particular neighbour qualified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s the difference between letter and spirit in one image. Same commandment. Two entirely different readings. One of them produces a man walking to Jericho with a stranger on his donkey; the other produces a correct answer and an empty road. That is where the letter killeth<\/strong> and where the spirit quickeneth, in one picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a story sometimes told of a woman who collapsed outside a church on a weekday afternoon, during a coffee hour, with maybe forty people inside. Several saw her through the glass. Most assumed somebody had already called someone. A few weren’t sure whether she was unhoused or unwell and didn’t want to embarrass her by guessing wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The person who went out was a trans woman who had been attending about six weeks and had not yet been asked to join anything. She sat on the pavement, got the woman’s head up, found out she was diabetic, got sugar into her, and stayed with her until the ambulance came.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Afterward, someone thanked her and said, a little awkwardly, that it was lucky she happened to be there. She said she hadn’t happened to be there. She’d been coming for six weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I tell it because it’s the parable’s own shape, not because it’s remarkable. The one who stopped was the one the room had not yet decided about. Everyone inside knew the commandment. She was the one out on the pavement with her hands in it. Knowing it and not going is precisely how the letter killeth<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is why Bloom does not screen anybody at the door\u2014not for their past, not for their present, not for what anyone predicts about their future. This is not sentimentality and it isn’t a lowered standard. It’s the plain operating consequence of a Gospel in which the mercy came from the person the audience had already written off. Screening at the door is just the letter killeth<\/strong> wearing a clipboard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Earlier this week we sat with a man who spent his life arguing the door should be narrower<\/a> and who was carried home through it anyway. And yesterday we watched one woman believe another before there was any evidence<\/a>. The week has been circling one point, and today it says it outright: what saves anybody is never the paperwork, because the letter killeth<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which brings us to today’s second name, briefly. St. Joachim is commemorated at this Mass as the father of the Blessed Virgin\u2014and he is never named in the Gospels at all<\/a>. Not once. Everything the Church has about him comes from outside the canon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By strict letter, he has no standing here whatsoever. And the Church keeps his day anyway, the day after his daughter’s, because of what came out of his house. If you wanted one small illustration of a tradition that refuses to be governed by letter alone, it’s a man with no scriptural paper trail holding a place on the calendar for fifteen hundred years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So take the instruction home in its own words: go, and do thou in like manner.<\/em> Not think about it in like manner. Not feel strongly about it in like manner. Go\u2014and let it cost you the oil, the wine, the ride, and the two pence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because love in deed and truth<\/a> is the only version the Gospel ever asks for. The letter killeth<\/strong>, and the spirit\u2014the spirit gets a half-dead man to an inn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Exodus 32:11, 13-14)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Moses prayed in the sight of the Lord his God and said: Why, O Lord, is Your indignation enkindled against Your people? Let the anger of Your mind cease; remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to whom You swore to give a land flowing with milk and honey. And the Lord was appeased from doing the evil which He had spoken of doing against His people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n O Lord, we beseech You, graciously look upon the offerings which we lay upon Your sacred altar; so that they may bring us plentiful forgiveness while they give honor to Your name. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Secret for the commemoration:)<\/em> Graciously accept, most merciful God, the sacrifice offered to Your majesty in honor of the holy Patriarch Joachim, father of the Virgin Mary, that by his intercession, together with that of his spouse and most blessed child, we may be found worthy to obtain full forgiveness of our sins and everlasting glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The Canon of the Mass is prayed here, from the Missal, and the Consecration made within Bloom’s own Independent Catholic tradition.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We come to the part of the Mass that is not a lesson. Here the Church stops explaining and simply does what it was given to do, in the words it has used for centuries, offered here as a real celebration within our own tradition and not a claim on anyone else’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whatever you brought in with you this morning\u2014the thing you couldn’t say out loud during the Confiteor, the person you’re carrying, the doubt you didn’t want to explain to anybody\u2014put it on the altar now. It belongs here as much as anything else does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No livestream can hand anyone a host. That is true of every Mass offered over video, anywhere, by anyone\u2014the format simply cannot deliver it. So the Church’s own long-standing practice stands in, the same one Roman bishops recommended to their own parishes watching from home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My Jesus, I believe that You are truly present in the Most Holy Sacrament. I love You above all things, and I desire to receive You into my soul. Since I cannot now receive You sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace You as if You were already there, and unite myself wholly to You. Never permit me to be separated from You. Amen.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n If the word Jesus<\/em> doesn’t sit easily in your mouth this morning, sit quietly through it. Wanting to be near what is good, when you can’t get to it, is a real prayer whatever you call the one you’re saying it to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Ps. 103:13-15)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The earth is replete with the fruit of Your works, O Lord; You produce bread from the earth, and wine to gladden men’s hearts, so that their faces gleam with oil, and bread fortifies the hearts of men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hear what the Church put in your ear on the way out: wine to gladden<\/em> and faces gleam with oil.<\/em> The Samaritan poured oil and wine into an open wound this morning. The same two things come back at Communion as ordinary blessings of a fed and gladdened life. What mercy costs on the road is what joy is made of at the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May the holy reception of this sacrament, we beseech You, O Lord, restore us to life, and bestow upon us forgiveness and protection. Through our Lord Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Postcommunion for the commemoration:)<\/em> We beseech You, almighty God, that by this sacrament which we have received, and by the pleading merits of holy Joachim, father of the Mother of Your beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, we may be found worthy to share Your grace in this life, and eternal glory in the life to come. Through the same Christ our Lord.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Given as Bloom’s own pastor, within Bloom’s own tradition)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Go now, and go slower than you meant to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n May God give you eyes that stop where they land, and hands willing to be inconvenienced, and enough of the Spirit in you that no rule you keep this week ever costs somebody else their dignity. And if you are the one in the road today\u2014may somebody with no obligation to you at all come near, and be moved, and stay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Go, and do thou in like manner.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe Penitential Rite<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Gloria<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Introit<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Collect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Commemoration<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Epistle<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Gradual<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Alleluia<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Gospel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Creed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Offering<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Offertory<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Secret<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Canon and Consecration<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Act of Spiritual Communion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Communion Antiphon<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Postcommunion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Closing Blessing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nFrequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n\n\n