Opening Mass for the San Antonio Catholic Worker National Gathering

The San Antonio Catholic Worker National Gathering opened with a powerful celebration of Mass on the Feast of the Guardian Angels, bringing together Catholic Workers from across the country in a spirit of prayer, reflection, and solidarity.

Summary

Father Jimmy Drennan, pastor of St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church in San Antonio, presided at the Mass. Before beginning his homily, Father Drennan shared a personal connection to the gathering site. As a former San Antonio police officer who worked undercover vice and narcotics and later served in the gang unit, he had patrolled this very area. The transformation of this space into a center of the Catholic Worker movement, Father Drennan explained, symbolizes what is possible “when we focus our energy and our efforts to lifting people up, recognizing the goodness in the hearts of all people and the possibilities that exist.”

The first reading from Nehemiah 8 recounted Ezra reading the Law to the assembled people and Nehemiah’s exhortation: “Go eat rich foods and drink sweet drinks and allot portions to those who have nothing prepared, for today is holy to our Lord.” The Gospel from Matthew challenged the disciples with Jesus’s words: “Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Father Drennan’s homily began by focusing on Ezra’s call to allot portions to those who have nothing. “Never in my lifetime, never in our lifetime have we been in such a state in this nation…where people are so desperate for help to have our presence in their lives.” The work of the Catholic Worker movement, he said, embodies this biblical mandate.

Father Drennan called Jesus’s command to become like children “one of the most challenging journeys we will ever face because it’s counter cultural and counter societal.” He shared an intimate story from his own life: growing up as one of four boys in a single-parent family after his father abandoned the family, he remembered finding comfort in his mother’s embrace as a child, then rejecting that affection as he grew older and tried to “become a man.”

When his mother, who was blind, fell and broke her ribs, developing pneumonia that proved fatal, Father Drennan and his brothers stood at her bedside. As she breathed her last breath, he recalled, “my brothers and I were holding on to her and we were fighting to get as close as we could to her bosom to touch her one last time.” In that moment, he understood Jesus’s teaching: childhood represents a time when “we believed that all people were equal,” when “we recognized the joy in helping one another,” when “we were less concerned about us getting ahead and more concerned about all of us being taken care of.”

While affirming the traditional Catholic belief that each person has a guardian angel, Father Dinan emphasized that these angels “set an example for how we should live our lives.” Angels guard, guide, protect, accompany, love, and lift up—and these actions show us what we ourselves can become for one another. When we call someone “an angel,” we recognize “the potential that exists within the hearts and the lives of each and every one of us.”

The summary above is drawn from the transcript automatically generated by YouTube.