There’s an old adage that Cincinnati is the only place where when people ask you “Where did you go to school?” they mean high school, not college. I have found this to be true, and unfortunately it frequently runs me headlong into an uncomfortable catch-22 surrounding my educational background. Many people ask me if I went to LaSalle because I’m always wearing their gear. Others assume I am a Roger Bacon man because of my St. Bernard origins. In reality, I am a proud son of Covington Latin, having thoroughly inconvenienced my parents by going to school not just across town, but out of state. When people discover this, the response is, almost inevitably, something along the lines of “Oh, so you’re a
super-genius then?”

 
There is no proper response to this. I have to either say that I am, in fact, surprisingly dumb, or haughtily claim that I am indeed some sort of child prodigy. Either way, it doesn’t look great. This is even more frustrating because the reality is that the most important thing about education is not the intellectual formation one receives at any of those fine institutions. In fact, it is the moral values and formation that underpins true education. The Catholic tradition of liberal arts education seeks truth for its own sake, but one’s life outside the classroom and workplace is where education must bear its essential fruits. If life in the modern age has taught us anything, it is that someone can be brilliant and immensely talented, but still be an uncaring, unscrupulous individual.

Both the first reading and the Gospel for this week speak to the preeminent importance of love for God and neighbor as the hallmark of our Faith. We live in a culture that values talent over and above character. But the Torah’s condemnation of dishonest business practices and Jesus’ command to put love of God and neighbor above everything else speaks to the foundation of Catholic Social Doctrine. There might have been money to be made in the exploitation of the foreigner and the alien, but advancing in wealth and social status is not real progress if it is done at the cost of devaluing human life and labor. The school of the pharisees and scribes valued attention to the letter of the law over following its spirit, but Jesus unequivocally places serving God through our neighbor over technicalities.
 
This presents a challenge for everyone living and ministering in our world. It is a call to value human life. It is a call to fight for what is truly just, rather than to always look out for number one. It is a call to build up treasure in the next life, even if it means making personal sacrifices here and now. Each of us can be blind to the way we treat our neighbors because of all the pressures on us to make ends meet and do what is right by our families. But none of this overrides Jesus’ call to put God and others before ourselves. As we draw towards the end of another year, we would all do well to bring Our Lord’s words to prayer and ask how we have fallen short of the call to love generously and give of ourselves. Take today’s Gospel to prayer and ask how Jesus might be calling you to live by a higher standard, the standard on which all Church teaching is founded: to love God with
all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.
 
Prayers always,
Fr. McC